Global demographic revolution and the future of humanity
Math modeling
Thomas Malthus was the first to turn to mathematical modeling to explain the limitation of population growth 200 years ago. In his model, exponential population growth, which doubles over time, is limited by linearly increasing food production, i.e. it is defined by resource depletion and starvation. These ideas captured the minds for many years and were developed already in the twentieth century, in the global models of the Club of Rome, created with the help of powerful computers and extensive databases. The research conducted led to an understanding of the significance of global problems, but the conclusions of the Limits to Growth project about an imminent resource crisis turned out to be incorrect. As the American economist and Nobel Prize winner Herbert Simon noted: “Forty years of experience in modeling complex systems on computers, which became more powerful and faster every year, have shown that brute force does not lead us along the royal path to understanding such systems... To overcome the “curse” complexity," modeling must return to its original principles."
The scale of the task itself, which has fundamental meaning for the sciences of man and society and practical significance for politics and economics, forces us to look for new ways to study this most important problem. The development of the population of our planet should be considered as the evolution of a self-organizing system, based on the ideas of synergetics. It is the methods of complex systems science that provide this opportunity and can introduce new concepts into traditional humanities fields. To do this, first of all, it is necessary to determine the law of growth and the nature of the demographic transition, which leads to the limitation of explosive growth and stabilization of the Earth's population, which has become the most characteristic feature of the current stage of the world demographic process.
The world as a global system
Modern development cannot be understood without considering the entire history of mankind, starting from the very first steps of its origin and evolution. The key should be considered the study of the evolution of the human system and those interactions that control growth. It is the interconnectedness and interdependence in the modern world, caused by transport and trade connections, migration and information flows, that unite all people into a single whole and allow us to consider the world as a global system. However, to what extent is this approach valid for the past? Due to the compression of historical time, the past turns out to be much closer to us than it seems at first glance. Within the framework of the proposed model, it is possible to formulate criteria for systematic growth, and as in the very distant past, when there were few people and the world was largely divided, the population of individual regions and countries slowly but surely interacted. However, in relation to the Earth's population as a closed system, migration should not be taken into account, since on a planetary scale there is nowhere to emigrate yet.
It is also significant that biologically all people belong to the same species, Homo sapiens: we have the same number of chromosomes - 46, different from all other primates, and all races are capable of mixing and social exchange. The habitat of our population is almost all suitable areas of the Earth. However, in terms of our numbers, we exceed the number of living beings comparable to us in size and method of nutrition by five orders of magnitude - a hundred thousand times! Only domestic animals living near humans are not limited in number, unlike their wild relatives, each species of which occupies its own ecological niche. There is every reason to assert that over the last hundred thousand years man has changed little biologically. But at a certain stage, as a result of the Neolithic revolution, humanity separated from the rest of the biosphere and created its own environment.
The main development and self-organization of our population took place in the social sphere. This was made possible thanks to a highly developed brain and consciousness - what distinguishes us from animals. Now that human activity has acquired a planetary scale, the question of our interaction with the surrounding nature has become increasingly urgent. Therefore, it is important to understand what factors determine the growth in the number of people on our planet. To do this, in accordance with the methods of synergetics, we will choose the population of the entire Earth as the main variable.
How many of us are there?
The population of the world at time T can be characterized by the total number of people N - the leading variable subordinating all others. The asymptotic method of synergetics allows us to neglect all other factors influencing growth at the first stage of analysis. The growth process will be considered on average and over a significant time interval - over a large number of generations. Then the life expectancy of a person will not be explicitly included in the calculation, as well as the distribution of people in space and by age and gender. This excludes exponential and logistic growth, which have a constant internal scale - doubling time. Demographic data makes it possible to describe the growth of the world population (see Fig. 1) by a power law, where time T expressed in years AD
Billions
A number of authors have proposed it as an empirical formula, since it characterizes the growth of the Earth's population over many thousands of years with amazing accuracy. However, we will consider this expression as a description of the process of self-similar development, which is represented by the population explosion. In other words, with self-similar growth, the dynamics of the process remain unchanged. Such growth, following the hyperbolic law, is known in physics and synergetics as exacerbation mode.
Figure 1. World population from 2000 BC. until 3000. Population growth limit N∞ = 10-12 billion.
1 - world population from 2000 BC. according to Biraben.
2 - Hyperbolic growth and exacerbation regime characterizing the demographic explosion
3 - demographic transition
4 - population stabilization
5 - Ancient world
6 - Middle Ages
7 - New and 8 - Recent history
- plague of 1348
O- 2000
↔ - error
On a semi-logarithmic grid, exponential growth is depicted as a straight line, which cannot in any way describe the development of humanity over any significant period of time. The growth graph clearly shows the compression of historical time as we approach the demographic transition.
A factor that is not included in the growth formula is the length of the reproductive period of a person's life. But it is precisely this that manifests itself during the passage through the demographic transition and limits the scope of application of the asymptotic growth formula. Taking this circumstance into account allows us to get rid of the divergence of growth as we approach 2025, as well as a similar feature in the distant past.
In the statistical theory we propose, the main dynamic characteristic of the system becomes the dimensionless constant K = 62000. This large parameter determines all the relationships in the calculation results and is also the scale of the size of the group of people involved in the collective interaction that describes growth. Numbers of this order characterize the optimal scale of a city or metropolitan area, and in population genetics, the number of a sustainably living species. Thus, the initial population of our distant ancestors in West Africa was about 100 thousand (K ~ 10 5). Thus, the value of K is associated with a number of phenomena in which the cooperative properties of a person are manifested; therefore, the growth rate in the era of explosive development can be represented in the form of a basic equation, where t=T/τ is time measured in units of effective generation, where τ= 45
In this nonlinear equation, growth rate is equated to collective interaction, which phenomenologically and averagely describes all processes of an economic, technological, cultural, social and biological nature. In other words, the growth rate depends entirely on the state of the system at a given moment and is equal to the square of the world population, which gives a measure of the network complexity of the demographic system. In many-particle physics, the well-known collective interaction is described in the same way, such as the van der Waals interaction in the theory of gases.
According to the above formula, the growth rate is expressed in terms of the world population at a given point in time. However, this expression can be interpreted as an average interaction associated with all previously accumulated information.
You can easily calculate the limit to which the human population tends in the foreseeable future after the demographic transition 
billion and express through time τ and population world billion. in T1=2000 the beginning of growth 
million years ago. If we integrate the entire process of growth from T 0 to our time T 1, then we can estimate the total number of people who have ever lived on Earth and is equal to 
billion people The justification and conclusion of all calculations are given in the author’s monograph “The General Theory of the Growth of the Earth’s Population”.
The mathematical apparatus used in the model is extremely simple and would have been quite accessible to Malthus himself, who, although he was planning to become a priest, took 9th place in a mathematics competition at the University of Cambridge. However, the application of the model to describe the development of society requires a revision of the traditions and approaches rooted in demography. Understanding the theory requires a certain effort on the part of those who are little familiar with the general methods developed in theoretical physics and the proposed approach, which to some may seem abstract and formal. This is due to the need to abandon reductionism - the desire to present everything as the result of the action of elementary factors and direct cause-and-effect relationships. Paradoxically, in this case it turns out that growth asymptotically depends not on fertility, but on the difference between fertility and mortality, which is directly related to socio-economic conditions. It is the interdependence and nonlinearity of strongly coupled mechanisms that makes us look for systemic (integrative) principles to describe the behavior of a complex system over long periods of time and over the entire space of the globe.
The effective interaction that determines growth is realized throughout the entire population of the Earth and over a significant period of time. Therefore, the overall nonlinear law of growth is neither reversible nor additive; it cannot be applied to a single country or region, but only to the entire interconnected population of our planet. But the global law of growth affects the demographic process in each country.
Global connections
Collective interaction is based on the transfer and multiplication of generalized information, which is associated with the activity of the human brain and mind. The dissemination and transmission of information (technology, cultural and religious customs, scientific knowledge, etc.) through an irreversible chain reaction qualitatively distinguishes both an individual and all of humanity in its development.
A person has a long childhood. The process of mastering speech, upbringing, training and education stretches for 20 or even 30 years. These years are used to form the mind, personality and consciousness, but childbearing is significantly delayed. This is the only way of development peculiar only to people, leading to the organization and self-organization of society.
The mechanism of cultural inheritance qualitatively distinguishes social inheritance in humans from genetic inheritance in the rest of the animal world. If biological evolution according to Darwin occurs without the inheritance of acquired characteristics, then social evolution rather follows Lamarck's idea of their transmission. This is how collective experience, proportional to the information interaction of all people, is transmitted to the next generation and spreads in breadth, synchronizing the development of humanity on our planet. The commonality of the global historical process has been repeatedly emphasized by outstanding historians Fernand Braudel, Karl Jaspers, and Nikolai Conrad.
During the Stone Age, humanity spread throughout the globe, with up to five glaciations occurring during the Pleistocene, and sea levels changing by hundreds of meters. At the same time, the geography of the Earth was redrawn, continents and islands were connected and separated again. Man, driven by cataclysms, explored more and more new lands, and his numbers grew at first slowly, then with an ever-increasing speed. It follows from the concept of the model that in cases where a population found itself separated from the bulk of humanity for a long time, its development slowed down. This is the fate of the Western Hemisphere, isolated 40 thousand years ago. Systematic growth took place in the Eurasian space, through which tribes roamed and peoples migrated, ethnic groups and languages were formed. Trade connections played a significant role, and the greatest importance was the Great Silk Road, a network of caravan routes connecting China and Europe, as well as India. Along this path, starting from antiquity, there was intense intercontinental exchange, technology and culture spread. Throughout the entire ecumene, the commonality of the world’s languages serves as significant indicators of interactions and migrations. Global connections are indicated by the emergence of shamanism and its spread a hundred thousand years ago, and from the “Axial Time” by world religions.
Demographic transition
Data on the world's population over the entire range of times fit the proposed model with sufficient reliability, despite the fact that the further we go into the past, the less accurate the data we have. Let us note that we know the time of historical eras of the past much more precisely than the size of the world population, for which only the order of magnitude is determined (see Table 1).
Table 1.
Of interest are future population calculations in which the modeling results can be compared with data from the UN and the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA). The UN forecast is based on a compilation of a range of possible fertility and mortality rates for nine regions of the world and is extended to 2150. According to the UN's optimal scenario, the world's population by this date will reach a permanent limit of 11,600 million. According to a 2003 report by the UN Population Division, by 2300 the planet's population will average 9 billion. The results of demographers' calculations and the mathematical model lead to the conclusion that after the transition, the Earth's population will stabilize at 10-11 billion people.
The duration of the transition, during which the Earth's population will triple, takes only 2 = 90 years, but during this time, which is 1/50,000 of the entire history of mankind, a radical change in the nature of its development will occur. However, despite the shortness of the transition, this time will survive 1/10 of all people who have ever lived on Earth. The severity of the global transition fully depends on the synchronization of development processes and interaction that takes place in the world demographic system. This serves as an undeniable example globalization, as a process that covers the entire population of our planet. However, the model indicates that humanity has always, from the very beginning, grown and developed as a global system, where effective interaction, common in nature, is realized in a single information space.
Figure 2. Demographic transition 1750-2100
World population growth averaged over decades. 1- developed countries; 2 - developing countries
"The connection of times has broken down..."
At present, it is the shock, the aggravation of the transition (when its characteristic time - 45 years - turns out to be less than the average life expectancy - 70 years) that leads to a disruption in the growth developed over millennia of our history. Today it is customary to say that the connection between times has been broken. This is due to unbalanced growth, leading to unsettled life and the stresses characteristic of our time. Associated with this process is the crisis and collapse of social consciousness, starting with the management of empires and countries, and ending with the level of consciousness of the individual and family. Associated with the breakdown of social governance is the rise of organized crime and corruption. It is possible that the spread of terrorism was also a consequence of the disruption of global balance. Unsettledness and lack of time to take root of what is fixed in the field of culture by tradition are undoubtedly reflected in the disintegration of morality, in the art and ideologies of our era. Thus, in the search for new ideas, when there is no time for their formation and dissemination, sometimes there is a rollback to the once fundamental ideas of the past. At the same time, new structures, such as the European Union, TNCs or non-governmental organizations, are looking for new ways of self-organization of society. Powerful global information systems such as the Internet are emerging, which materialize the collective consciousness of humanity. An international system of media and education is taking shape. Science has always developed in a single world of knowledge.
If reason and consciousness led to an exceptional, explosive growth in the number of people on Earth, now, as a result of a global limitation of the main mechanism of information development, the growth suddenly stopped, and its parameters, which fundamentally affect all aspects of our lives, have changed. In other words, as in the world of computers, our “software” does not keep up in its development with technology, with the “hardware” of civilization.
Unevenness of historical time
A significant result of the growth theory was the idea of a change in the flow of historical time - its acceleration, well known to historians and philosophers.
The change in the time scale that occurs as humanity grows can be easily represented mathematically if we refer to the instantaneous time of exponential growth T e = T 1 - T as a measure of change; then the growth is % per year. Since today we are very close to T1, then T e is simply equal to moving into the past. So 100 years ago T e =100 years, and the relative growth was equal to 1% per year. At the beginning of our era, 2 thousand years ago, growth was 0.05% per year, and 100 thousand years ago - 0.001% per year, i.e. it was so small that society was considered static. However, even then humanity grew proportionately, at the same relative pace as later, until the very beginning of the demographic transition in 1955.
The compression of system time is clearly visible if large historical periods are represented on a logarithmic grid. The table shows that the observations of anthropologists and the traditional ideas of historians clearly outline the boundaries of eras, evenly dividing the time on a logarithmic scale from T 0 = 4-5 million years ago to T 1 = 2000. After each cycle, the time remaining until the critical date , half the cycle duration. Thus, the Lower Paleolithic lasted a million years and ended half a million years ago, and the Middle Ages lasted a thousand years and ended 500 years ago. The very duration of demographic cycles varied from one million to 45 years and during each of l n K = 11 periods, 9 billion people lived. In this view, the Neolithic is in the middle of the development path (Table 1).
The acceleration of the historical process also occurs in relation to major historical phenomena. Thus, according to the historian Gibbon, the decline and decay of the Roman Empire lasted 1.5 thousand years, while current empires are created over centuries and disintegrate over decades. The transformation of historical system time is associated with the idea of longue dur?e as the concept of temporal extension in the French New Historical Science. The geometric reduction in the duration of historical periods as we approach our time is discussed by the St. Petersburg historian I.M. Dyakonov in the review "Paths of History. From Ancient Man to the Present Day."
Since the time of Hegel, following the eschatological tradition of the West, historians have proclaimed the end of History. The East perceived time as a cyclically repeating endless series of events, a sequence of reincarnations. However, the model combines both ideas about historical time. Moreover, the acceleration of the systemic development time is marked by a sequence of structural transformations, which physicists call phase transitions, of which the main one is the demographic transition.
Thus, the outlined approach made it possible to cover the entire development of humanity, considering the growth of its numbers as a process of self-organization. This became possible due to the transition to the next level of integration compared to that accepted in demography, when traditional demography methods were used to describe the behavior of an individual country or region on a time scale of one or two generations. In the presented periodization, without even turning to the formal conclusions of the modeling, it is clear how when the limit of compression of historical time is reached, an entire era of growth ends and, as a consequence, a change in the development paradigm occurs. After the demographic transition, humanity will enter a new era of its development with a new structure of time and zero or little numerical growth.
Demographic imperative
Following the demographer Landry, who discovered the demographic transition using the example of France, it is fair to believe that the period from the middle of the 18th century to the end of the 21st century should be called the era demographic revolution. We see that it represents the most significant event in human history since the appearance of our distant ancestors 1-2 million years ago. Then, in the process of the evolution of life on Earth, Homo sapiens appeared. Now we have approached the limit of the resources of his mind, but not the resources of his material existence.
Growth, described by cooperative interaction, including all types of human activity, essentially takes into account the development of science and technology as a systemic factor - a development that does not fundamentally distinguish our time in comparison with the past. Taking the law of development unchanged, as can be seen from the invariance of the quadratic growth of the world population before the demographic revolution, it should be assumed that it is not the depletion of resources, overpopulation or the development of science and medicine that will determine the change in the growth algorithm. Therefore, we must look for another reason for the change and limitation of population reproduction, as the main function of society.
Its change is determined not by external conditions, but by internal reasons, primarily by limiting the rate of growth, determined by the nature of the human mind and quantitatively expressed in the time spent on its formation. The influence of external, global conditions can only be felt in the next approximation, that is, when human activity becomes a planetary factor in the co-evolution of the biosphere and humanity. This significant conclusion is in conflict with traditional Malthusian ideas about the resource limitation of growth. As a result, in contrast to Malthus’s population principle, the principle should be formulated information demographic imperative.
Consequences of the demographic transition
Man has always had sufficient resources for further development, mastered them, settling throughout the Earth, and increased production efficiency. Until now and, apparently, in the foreseeable future, such resources will be available and will allow humanity to go through a demographic transition in which the population will no more than double. During this period, when contacts, resources and space were insufficient, local development ended, but on average overall growth was steady. Hunger in many regions is not associated with a general lack of food, but with methods of its distribution, which are of social and economic, rather than global resource origin.
Synergetics shows how the sustainability of overall growth is associated with rapid internal, civilizational processes of history, which have a smaller scale and stability than the main development covered by global interaction. Currently, a loss of systemic stability is possible when developing countries go through a demographic transition in a situation similar to that in which Europe found itself at the beginning of the twentieth century. During the World Wars, total population losses reached 250 million, an average of 12 thousand per day for 40 years. The transition is now happening twice as fast and reaching ten times as many people as it did in Europe then. The situation is that over the past fifteen years, China's economy has been growing at more than 10% per year, while its population of more than 1.2 billion is growing at 1.1%. India's population has crossed the billion mark and is growing by 1.9%, and the economy by 6% per year. Along with similar figures characterizing the rapid development of countries in the Asia-Pacific region, ever-increasing gradients of population growth and economic inequality are emerging. The presence of nuclear weapons in this region can both maintain the balance and threaten global security.
The demographic factor undoubtedly manifests itself in Muslim countries, where the rapid emergence of masses of restless youth in the process of urbanization destabilizes society. Moreover, for cultural reasons, Islam contributes little to economic cooperation, so the resulting “clash of civilizations” is associated not so much with the religious factor, but with the lag in the development of some Islamic countries.
Thus, the increasing unevenness of development can cause a loss of growth sustainability and, as a consequence, lead to wars. Such imbalances cannot be predicted, but indicating their likelihood is not only possible, but also necessary. It is precisely in maintaining the stability of development in an era of drastic changes that the main task of the world community lies. Without this, it is impossible to solve any other global problems, no matter how significant they may seem. Therefore, when discussing security issues, along with military, economic and environmental security, the demographic factor of world security and stability should be taken into account, which should take into account not only the quantitative parameters of population growth, but also qualitative, including ethnic, factors.
A paradoxical consequence of the demographic transition in developed countries is that families with an income of $100 a day have 1.15 children per woman. At the same time, in developing countries, families with an income of $2 a day have 5-6 children. Thus, modern developed society is demographically untenable. Under such conditions, it is impossible to stabilize the population of developed countries after the demographic transition without restoring the birth rate to the level of 2.1 children per woman and changing the values that guide society. Otherwise, the indigenous population of these countries will be displaced by emigrants with a high birth rate. Massive migration is already leading to contradictions that are evident in the modern world. This issue was recently examined by the famous American historian Patrick Buchanan in the book "The Death of the West: How Dying Populations and Invasive Emigrants Threaten Our Country and Civilization."
Economic aspect of demography
The proposed model considers the world population as a single self-organizing system. This allows us to cover a huge range of time and a range of phenomena, which includes essentially the entire history of mankind. The model offers a phenomenological, macroscopic description of phenomena, which is based on the idea of cooperative interaction, including all processes of a cultural, economic, technological, social and biological nature, leading to self-accelerated hyperbolic growth. This collective interaction is associated with consciousness, which in principle distinguishes humanity from the animal kingdom. It is expressed in culture as a factor in the development and transmission of information occurring between generations, as well as in its distribution throughout the ecumene. The latter circumstance leads to the synchronization of global development observed throughout the history and prehistory of mankind.
On the scale of global history, which Braudel called total history, development is stable and deterministic. And only as the spatial and temporal scale decreases, chaos sets in (as it is understood in synergetics and observed in history), which makes such processes unpredictable. Currently, it is non-equilibrium processes that lead not only to overall growth, but also to uneven development, an increase in the gap between wealth and poverty, which is so characteristic of the transitional era experienced by humanity.
These ideas are important for understanding global development from an economic perspective. Neoclassical economics considers linear models of reversible exchange and slow growth. This economic model of Walras is based on an analogy with thermodynamics, with its principle of detailed equilibrium and additive conservation laws. In the nonlinear model of quadratic growth, non-equilibrium and irreversible, information is not only not preserved, but is multiplied throughout the development of mankind. Moreover, the nonlinear model is not reducible to a linear one and, requiring a fundamentally different justification, acquires special significance for understanding the process of unbalanced development of humanity throughout history. Such ideas, associated with the generalization of the ideas of Max Weber and Joseph Schumpeter, underlie the evolutionary economics and economics of knowledge, which V.L. spoke about at the General Meeting of the Russian Academy of Sciences in 2002. Makarov. In this regard, it is worth paying attention to the symptomatic remark of the American publicist Francis Fukuyama: “Failure to understand that the foundations of economic behavior lie in the area of consciousness and culture leads to the widespread misconception in which material causes are attributed to those phenomena in society that, by their nature, are mainly belong to the realm of the spirit."
During the transition, labor productivity in industry and agriculture increases significantly, with 4% of the population feeding the entire country, and the service sector employs up to 80% of the workforce. An increase in the number of urban residents leads to changes in family structure, criteria for growth and success, priorities and values of society. Changes occur so rapidly that neither individuals, nor society as a whole, nor its institutions have time to adapt to new circumstances. Due to the short horizon of foresight, the collapse of socially-oriented planning principles in the economy occurs, and the dominance of the market element leads to the thoughtless development of a consumer society, and, as a result, to neglect of the environment.
A significant and general result of the demographic revolution will be an increase in life expectancy and a decrease in the birth rate, as a result of which the number of elderly people will increase and there will be fewer young people. In particular, this will lead to a decrease in demographic reserves for creating mass armies in developed countries. On the other hand, the burden on the health care and social security systems for pensioners will increase. Thus, in the foreseeable future, with a constant world population and its significant aging, two development alternatives are possible - either stagnation or even decline, or an increase in the quality of life.
The latter depends entirely on the development of culture, science and education. In developed countries, the time devoted to education is constantly increasing, a system of continuous education is developing - live and learn, while the birth rate is falling catastrophically - this is how the cultural factor limits the birth rate. This dilemma faces modern Russia (as well as all developed humanity) with particular acuteness. Thus, the transition after the demographic revolution to a new development paradigm will lead to profound changes in the historical process and its anticipation should attract the attention of everyone who seriously thinks about the fate of the world.
Look into the future
We first proposed quantitative theory of historical process. Demographic and temporal analysis of world development provides a global perspective of vision - a picture that can be considered metahistorical, located above history in breadth and time of coverage. As a phenomenological description, it does not address the details of those specific mechanisms in which we habitually seek explanations for the events of fast-moving life. Therefore, this methodology may seem abstract and even mechanistic to some. However, the generalizations obtained as a result of applying this approach provide a fairly complete and objective picture of the real world.
The development of humanity is based on the ability of the intellect to receive, comprehend and transmit information and ideas about the world around us, including the world of man himself. If evolution led to the emergence of consciousness, then today collective consciousness itself can become a new factor in the evolution of man and society. This is what determines the place and importance of science in the modern world. At the same time, our time has become critical, since explosive growth suddenly ended with a transition to a new stage of development and acutely raised the question of understanding the present and managing future development, no longer associated with numerical growth. Therefore, a comprehensive research program is needed that will allow the results obtained to be applied in various areas of the social sciences and, if possible, to implement them in life.
It is difficult to imagine that in the foreseeable future and in the absence of proper global political will, we will be able to consciously influence the global growth process, both due to the scale of what is happening and the pace of development of events, the very understanding of which is not yet complete. But at the same time, the proposed ideas contribute to the understanding and development of a general perspective of human development, “suitable” for history and economics, anthropology and demography. If doctors and politicians consider the systemic preconditions of the current transitional historical period as a source of stress for an individual and a critical condition for the world community, then the goals of the presented experience of interdisciplinary research will be achieved.
1 - Kapitsa S.P., General theory of world population growth. "Science", M. 1999.
2 - See Savelyeva I.M. and Poletaev A.V., History and time. In search of the lost. M. "Languages of Russian culture". 1997. A special issue of the journal “In the World of Science” No. 12 for 2003 was devoted to these issues.
Famous Russian scientist S.P. Kapitsa presented his version of the causes of the demographic crisis.
On October 20–21, the All-Russian Scientific Conference “Russian National Identity and the Demographic Crisis” was held in Moscow. The main organizer of the conference was the Center for Problem Analysis and Public Management Design (CPA GUP). Famous scientists and government officials made presentations, for example: S.S. Sulakshin, V.I. Yakunin, S.P. Kapitsa, V.E. Bagdasaryan and others. “TsPA State Unitary Enterprise” intends to publish a collection of articles based on the results of the conference. And with the report of the famous Russian scientist S.P. Kapitsa, with the permission of the Central Administration of the State Unitary Enterprise, we invite readers of “Russian Civilization” to familiarize themselves.
The global demographic crisis and Russia
Humanity is experiencing an era of global demographic revolution. A time when, after explosive growth, the world's population suddenly switches to limited reproduction and abruptly changes the nature of its development. This greatest event in the history of mankind since its inception is primarily manifested in population dynamics. However, it affects all aspects of the lives of billions of people, and that is why demographic processes have become the most important global problem in the world and in Russia. Not only the present, but also the foreseeable future, development priorities and sustainable growth depend on their fundamental understanding.
The phenomenon of demographic transition, when expanded reproduction of the population is replaced by limited reproduction and stabilization of the population, was discovered for France by demographer A. Landry. Studying this critical era of population development, he rightly believed that in terms of the depth and significance of its consequences it should be considered a revolution. However, demographers limited their research to the population dynamics of individual countries and saw their task as explaining what was happening through specific social and economic conditions. This approach made it possible to formulate recommendations for demographic policy, but in this way it excluded understanding of the broader, global aspects of this problem. Consideration of the world population as a whole, as a system, was denied in demography, since with this approach it was impossible to determine the reasons for the transition common to humanity. Only by rising to the global level of analysis, changing the scale of the problem, and considering all the world's populations as a single object, as a system, was it possible to describe the global demographic transition from the most general positions. Such a generalized understanding of history turned out to be not only possible, but also very effective. To do this, it was necessary to radically change the method of research, the point of view, both in space and time, and consider humanity from the very beginning of its appearance as a global structure. It should be emphasized that most major historians, such as Fernand Braudel, Karl Jaspers, Immanuel Wallerstein, Nikolai Conrad, Igor Dyakonov, argued that a significant understanding of human development is possible only at the global level. It is in our era, when globalization has become a sign of the times, that this approach opens up new opportunities in the analysis of both the current state of the world community, growth factors in the past, and development paths in the foreseeable future.
The Club of Rome was the first to put global issues on the agenda 30 years ago. These studies relied on the analysis of extensive databases and computer modeling of the processes that, according to the authors, determined growth and development. However, the club’s first report, “The Limits to Growth,” was deeply criticized, and the main conclusion that the limits of human growth are determined by resources turned out to be untenable. To understand the difficulties of direct mathematical modeling, consider the insightful remark of Nobel Prize-winning American economist Herbert Simon: “Forty years of experience modeling complex systems on computers that grew bigger and faster every year has taught us that brute force will not lead us down the royal path.” to understanding such systems... Thus, modeling will require an appeal to the basic principles that will lead to the resolution of this paradox of complexity.” Thus, it was then that global problems were highlighted, to which we have now returned at a new level of understanding and development of mathematical modeling methods.
Mathematical model of population growth
Until the turn of 2000, the population of our planet was growing at an ever-increasing rate. At that time, it seemed to many that a population explosion, overpopulation and the inevitable depletion of natural resources and reserves would lead humanity to disaster. However, in 2000, when the world population reached 6 billion and the population growth rate peaked at 87 million per year or 240 thousand people per day, the growth rate began to decrease. Moreover, both the calculations of demographers and the general theory of population growth on Earth indicate that in the very near future, growth will practically cease. Thus, the population of our planet, as a first approximation, will stabilize at the level of 10 - 12 billion and will not even double compared to what it already is. The transition from explosive growth to stabilization occurs in a historically insignificantly short period of time - less than a hundred years, and this will complete the global demographic transition.
As a result, it turned out that it is the nonlinear dynamics of human population growth, subject to our own internal forces, that determines our development and its limit. This allows us to formulate the phenomenological principle of the demographic imperative, in contrast to Malthus’s population principle, where resources determine the limits of growth.
Until very recently, the sudden appearance of man was a mystery, since there were no intermediate stages preceding our appearance as a species. However, the discovery of the HAR-1F gene has recently been reported. This RNA gene controls brain development during the first 7 to 19 weeks of embryonic development. A mutation of this gene led 7 to 5 million years ago to the fact that the human brain was able to suddenly grow. It is in this that one should see the reason for the emergence of a qualitatively higher level of intelligence, which opened the way for the subsequent development of humanity, which is described by the model developed below.
Thus, human ancestors arose among the apes and appeared in Africa millions of years ago. Then, after a long era of anthropogeny (A), they began to speak, mastered fire and the technology of stone tools. The number of our most ancient ancestors was about one hundred thousand, and people had already begun to spread throughout the globe. Since then, the process of our development has remained unchanged and that is why its understanding is so significant for us today, when the number of people has increased another hundred thousand times - to modern billions. Not a single species of animal comparable to us has ever developed like this: for example, even now about one hundred thousand bears or wolves live in Russia, and the same number of large monkeys live in tropical countries. Only domestic animals have multiplied their numbers far beyond their wild counterparts: number in the world
In order to explain the essence of the problem, let us turn to how humanity has grown in number and developed over the past 4 thousand years. The starting point was the fact that the growth of the Earth's population is subject to a surprisingly simple and universal pattern of hyperbolic growth. Where the population is presented on a logarithmic scale, and the passage of time is presented on a linear scale, which indicates the main periods of world history. If the world's population grew exponentially, then such growth would be shown schematically on a straight line graph. Therefore, this representation of growth is widely used in statistics and economics when they want to show that growth occurs according to the law of compound interest.
The secret of hyperbolic, explosive development is that the rate of its growth is proportional not to the first power of the population, as in the case of exponential growth, but to the second power - to the square of the world population, as a measure of development. It was the analysis of the hyperbolic growth of mankind, connecting the number and growth of mankind with its development and the measure of which is the square of the world population, which made it possible to understand in a new way all the specifics of the history of mankind and to propose a general collective mechanism of development based on the dissemination and reproduction of information. Such quadratic growth is well studied in physics, and it manifests itself when development occurs due to the collective interaction that arises in a dynamic system, when all its components intensively interact with each other. As an instructive example of such processes, let us cite an atomic bomb, in which a nuclear explosion occurs as a result of a branched chain reaction. The quadratic growth of the population of our planet indicates that a similar process is occurring with humanity - only much slower, but no less dramatic. If exponential growth is determined by a person’s individual ability to reproduce, then the explosive development of humanity is a collective process, occurring throughout society and covering the entire world.
Thus, a growth rate proportional to the square of the world population indicates a collective and cooperative interaction responsible for growth. Slow at the beginning, development accelerates, and as we approach the year 2000. it rushes into the infinity of the population explosion. The task of the theory and model of hyperbolic growth is to establish the limits of applicability of this time-averaged asymptotic growth formula. These limits are determined by the fact that the asymptotic expressions, due to the self-similarity of growth, do not depend on the local time scale of development associated with the effective life expectancy of a person. Taking into account this time, equal to 45 years, determines both the moment of the beginning of human history 4 - 5 million years ago, and the passage of the world population through the peak of the global demographic transition in 2000. As a result, in elementary terms, but based on the statistical principles of theoretical physics, it was possible to describe the dynamically self-similar development of humanity over more than a million years - from the emergence of man to our time and the onset of the demographic transition. Thanks to averaging, this interaction is not local and has a memory of the past, and therefore global growth is expressed through the instantaneous value of the Earth's population. Despite the simplicity of the model, it points to the stability of deterministic global growth, which is stabilized by the rapid and chaotic disturbances of current history. These mechanisms are well studied in the nonlinear theory of large systems. Thus, based on the model, it is possible to estimate the total number of people who have ever lived on Earth - about 100 billion, the number of main periods of development, assess the sustainability of growth and obtain a number of other results on the nature of the demographic revolution. We emphasize that there is every reason to believe that the quadratic interaction responsible for growth is due to the exchange and dissemination of generalized information. It spreads through a chain reaction and multiplies irreversibly at every stage of development, and humanity from the very beginning, for a million years now, has been an information community.
Growth of the Earth's population and time in History
The ancient world lasted about three thousand years, the Middle Ages - a thousand years, the Modern Age - three hundred years, and Recent history - just over a hundred years. Historians have long paid attention to this contraction of historical time, but to understand the compaction of time, it must be compared with the dynamics of population growth. Unlike the usual exponential growth, when the relative growth rate is constant and the population multiplies over a certain time, for hyperbolic growth the multiplication time is proportional to the antiquity, calculated from the critical year 2000. Thus, 2000 years ago the population grew by 0.05% per year, 200 years ago - by 0.5% per year, and 100 years ago - by 1% per year. Humanity reached a maximum relative growth rate of 2% in 1960. - 40 years earlier than the maximum absolute growth of the world population. Thus, during each of the 11 periods of development from the Lower Paleolithic to the demographic revolution, 9 billion people lived. If the duration of the Lower Paleolithic was one million years, then the last period of the global demographic transition lasted only 45 years.
It can be shown that such accelerated development leads to the fact that after each period, all remaining development takes place in a time equal to half the duration of the previous stage. So, after the Lower Paleolithic, which lasted a million years, half a million years remain until our time; after the millennium of the Middle Ages, 500 years remain. These stages of development, identified by anthropologists and historians, occur synchronously throughout the world, when all peoples are covered by a common information process. The compression of the time of historical development is also visible in how the speed of the historical process increases as it approaches our time. If the history of Ancient Egypt and China took thousands of years and is counted in dynasties, then the pace of the history of Europe was determined by individual reigns. If the Roman Empire collapsed within a thousand years, then modern empires disappeared within decades, and in the case of the Soviet Empire, even faster. Thus, in the last era of the demographic revolution, the acceleration of the historical process reached its limit before the era (C) of stabilization of the population growth of our planet.
The onset of the Neolithic, when there was a concentration of population in villages and cities, appears exactly in the middle of the era of explosive development (B), represented in logarithmically transformed time. The demographic revolution appears as a strong phase transition, when, due to the instability of the explosive growth of humanity in an aggravated regime, a change in the growth rate and a fundamental change in the development paradigm itself occur. Thus, at the moment of the demographic explosion, as in a shock wave, the internal time of history, the intrinsic duration of development, is reduced to the limit. This limit of time compression cannot be shorter than the effective life of a person, and that is why this is followed by a sharp turn in our development; if not the end of History, as stated by Francis Fukuyama, then a fundamental change in the rate of growth of mankind begins. History, naturally, will continue after the world population stops growing, but as a consequence of the demographic revolution and at a much calmer pace.
This is how the global growth of humanity appears if we analyze metahistory in the light of the development of the demographic system and the logarithmic transformation of time. The dynamic view of the course of historical time has long been discussed in historical science, but in the developed theory it acquires, as in the theory of relativity, a quantitative meaning when historical time is equal to the logarithm of physical, Newtonian time. In transformed time, historical processes appear uniform throughout the entire development, which expresses the dynamic self-similarity of growth, although the pace of development itself differs tens of thousands of times. Thus, as a result of time compression, the historical past turns out to be much closer to us than it seems at first glance at the number of generations and calendar time of past eras.
The driving factor of development is connections that embrace all of humanity in a single effective information field. This connection should be understood generally as customs, beliefs, ideas, skills and knowledge passed on from generation to generation during the training, education and upbringing of a person as a member of society. It is generalized information that determines the dynamics of social and economic processes. Global development invariably follows a trajectory of hyperbolic growth, which cannot be significantly disrupted by pandemics, world wars, or natural disasters. Naturally, there are ups and downs of growth, ways of life change, peoples migrate, fight and disappear, and the further into the past we look at the pace of development, the slower it happens. Then, during the life of man, circumstances and lifestyle changed little, despite the fluctuations and disturbances that always existed, including ice ages and climate changes greater than those that are so much talked about today. In the era of the demographic revolution, it is precisely the scale of significant social changes occurring during a person’s life that has become so significant that neither an individual nor society as a whole has time to adapt to the pace of changes in the world order - a person is “in a hurry to live and in a hurry to feel,” like never before.
Analysis shows that growth proportional to the square of the world population expresses the collective nature of the forces determining development. This connection has existed at all times, only in the past it took longer. Let us emphasize that this immutable law is applicable only for an integral closed system, such as the interconnected population of the world. As a result, global growth does not require migration to be taken into account, since it is an internal process of interaction through the movement of people, which does not directly affect their numbers, since our planet is still difficult to leave. This nonlinear law cannot be extended to a single country or region, but the development of each country should be considered against the backdrop of world population growth. A consequence of the non-locality of the quadratic growth law is the noted synchronization of the world historical process and the inevitable lag of isolates, which found themselves long separated from the bulk of humanity.
Global demographic revolution
1.Analysis of accompanying phenomena
When analyzing the phenomena accompanying the demographic revolution, one can follow two paths. Firstly, you can start from the specific observations of a historian or sociologist regarding significant social patterns from the country, and synthesize a general picture of development from the particulars. Or you can, based on the general concept, analyze specific phenomena. Obviously, both approaches are effective. However, the second, based on the general picture of development, allows us to achieve a more complete understanding of the ongoing changes at a general level and, on the basis of a new synthesis, to establish the fundamental primacy of the mechanism of the information process of growth. This is precisely what is important if we want to understand the meaning of this unique historical era that humanity is experiencing.
The population of developed countries has already stabilized at one billion. They went through the transition just 50 years before developing countries, and now in these countries we can see a series of phenomena that are gradually spreading to the rest of humanity. In Russia, many crisis phenomena, even in an intensified form, reflect the global crisis. Meanwhile, the transition in developing countries affects more than 5 billion people, whose numbers will double as the global demographic transition ends in the second half of the 21st century. This is happening twice as fast as in Europe. The speed of growth and development processes is striking in its intensity - for example, the Chinese economy is growing by more than 10% per year. Such changes and growth were occurring in Russia and Germany on the eve of the First World War and undoubtedly contributed to the crisis of the 20th century. Energy production in the countries of Southeast Asia is growing by 7–8% per year, and the Pacific Ocean is becoming the last Mediterranean on the planet after the Atlantic Ocean and the Mediterranean Sea.
2.Demographic situation on a global scale
Let's look at population calculations in the future, where the modeling results can be compared with calculations by the UN, the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis (IIASA), and other agencies. The UN forecast is based on a generalization of a number of scenarios for fertility and mortality in 9 regions of the world and is extended to 2150. By this time, according to the UN optimal scenario, the Earth's population will reach a constant limit of 11 billion. 600 million. In the report of the UN Population Division in 2003, according to the average option, by 2300. 9 billion are expected. As a result, both demographers’ calculations and growth theory lead to the conclusion that after the transition, the Earth’s population will stabilize at 10–11 billion. The difference between the world population and the calculation data, which coincide before and after the World Wars, makes it possible to estimate the total losses of humanity during this period, amounting to 250 - 280 million people, which is more than the usually given figures. At present, the mobility of peoples, classes and people has increased exceptionally. Both the Asia-Pacific countries and other developing countries are affected by powerful migration processes. Population movements occur both within countries (primarily from villages to cities) and between countries. The growth of migration processes, which are now sweeping the whole world, leads to destabilization of both developing and developed countries, giving rise to a set of problems that require separate consideration. The dynamics of modern developed society undoubtedly create a stressful environment. This happens at the individual level when the bonds that lead to family formation and stability are broken down. One consequence of this was the sharp decline in the number of children per woman observed in developed countries. So, in Spain this number is 1.20; in Germany - 1.41; in Japan -1.37; in Russia - 1.21 and in Ukraine -1.09, while on average 2.15 children are needed to maintain simple reproduction of the population. Thus, all the richest and most economically developed countries, which went through the demographic transition 30–50 years earlier, turned out to be incompetent in their main function - population reproduction. This is facilitated by: a long period of education; liberal value system; the collapse of traditional ideologies in the modern world. If this trend continues, then the main population of developed countries is doomed to extinction and displacement by emigrants from more fertile ethnic groups. This is one of the strongest signals that demographics give us. If in the 19th and 20th centuries. During the peak of population growth in Europe, emigrants headed to the colonies, but now a reverse movement of peoples has arisen, significantly changing the ethnic composition of the metropolises. Let us note that a significant, and in many cases the overwhelming majority of migrants are illegal and, in essence, not under the control of the authorities.
Thus, if in developed countries we note a sharp decline in population growth, in which the population does not renew itself and is rapidly aging, then in the developing world the opposite picture is still observed - where the population, which is dominated by young people, is growing rapidly. The change in the ratio of older and younger people was the main result of the demographic revolution, and has now led to the maximum stratification of the world by age composition. It is the youth, which becomes more active in the era of the demographic revolution, that is a powerful driving force of historical development. The stability of the world largely depends on where these forces are directed. For Russia, such a region has become Central Asia - its “soft underbelly”, where the population explosion, the state of the economy and the water supply crisis have led to a tense situation in the very center of Eurasia. In the future, with the completion of the demographic revolution by the end of the 21st century, there will be a general aging of the world population. If at the same time the number of children among emigrants also decreases, becoming less than what is necessary for the reproduction of the population, this state of affairs can lead to a crisis in the development of humanity on a global scale. However, it can be assumed that the crisis of population reproduction itself was a reaction to the demographic revolution and therefore can be overcome in the foreseeable future.
3.Demographic revolution and crisis of ideologies
The demographic revolution is expressed not only in demographic processes, but also in the destruction of the connection of times, the collapse of consciousness and chaos, and in the moral crisis of society. This is clearly reflected in the manifestations, first of all, of mass culture, so irresponsibly disseminated by the media, in some trends in modern art and postmodernism in philosophy. Such a listing of critical phenomena is inevitably incomplete, but it is intended to draw attention to moments that, although of different scales, have common causes in the era of global demographic transition, when the discrepancy between consciousness and physical development potential has increased so much.
This crisis is global in nature, and its ultimate expression, undoubtedly, has become nuclear weapons and the excessive armament of some countries, the crisis of the concept: “you have strength, you don’t need intelligence.” The impotence of force was clearly demonstrated by the collapse of the Soviet Union, when, despite the enormous armed forces, it was ideology that turned out to be the “weak link.” However, along with this, new development goals arise, a search and change of values occurs, affecting the very foundations of ensuring sustainability and managing society as a knowledge society. When considering the mechanisms of growth and development of society, it should be noted that the model of information development describes a non-equilibrium growth process. It is fundamentally different from conventional models of economic growth, where the archetype is the thermodynamics of equilibrium systems in which slow, adiabatic development occurs, and the market mechanism contributes to the establishment of detailed economic equilibrium, when processes are in principle reversible and the concept of property corresponds to the laws of conservation. However, these ideas, at best, act locally and are not applicable when describing the irreversible global process of dissemination and multiplication of information that does not occur locally and therefore are not applicable when describing non-equilibrium development. Note that economists since the days of early Marx, Max Weber and Joseph Schumpeter have noted the influence of intangible factors in our development, as Francis Fukuyama recently stated: “Failure to understand that the foundations of economic behavior lie in the field of consciousness and culture leads to a common misconception, according to to which material causes are attributed to those phenomena in society which, by their nature, primarily belong to the realm of the spirit.”
Let's return to the crisis of ideologies and the system of moral norms and values that govern people's behavior. Such norms are formed and reinforced by tradition over a long period of time, and in an era of rapid change, this time simply does not exist. Thus, during the period of the demographic revolution in a number of countries, including Russia, there is a collapse of consciousness and management of society, erosion of power and management responsibility, organized crime and corruption are growing and, as a reaction to the unsettled life and underemployment of the population, the growth of alcoholism, drug addiction and suicide, leading to increased mortality among men. In developed countries, labor is moving from manufacturing to services. For example, in Germany in 1999. turnover in the information technology sector was greater than in the automobile industry, a pillar of the German economy. Along with this, there is a growth of marginal phenomena, a revision of established concepts without proper selection and critical analysis for the development of principles and criteria in culture and ideology, which are then enshrined in tradition and legislation.
On the other hand, the abstract and largely outdated concepts of some philosophers, theologians and sociologists that came from the past acquire the meaning, if not the sound, of political slogans. From here arises an irrepressible desire to “correct” history and apply it to our time, when the historical process, which previously took centuries, has now been extremely accelerated and which urgently requires a new understanding, and not hopes and searches for solutions in the past or submission to the blind pragmatism of current politics. Thus, the extreme compression of historical time leads to the fact that the time of virtual history has merged with the time of real politics.
Rapid growth is accompanied by manifestations of increasing disequilibrium in society and the economy in the distribution of labor results, information and resources, in the primacy of local self-organization over the organization, the market with its short horizon of vision compared to longer-term social priorities for the development of society and the decreasing role of the state in economic management. Along with the collapse of previous ideologies, the growth of self-organization and the development of civil society, old structures are being replaced by new ones in search of new connections, ideas and development goals that affect the foundations of management and sustainability of society.
The demographic factor, which is associated with the phase of the demographic transition, plays a significant role in the emergence of the danger of war and armed conflicts, primarily in developing countries. Moreover, the very phenomenon of terrorism expresses a state of social tension, as was already the case at the peak of the demographic transition in Europe in the second half of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Note that a quantitative analysis of the sustainability of the development of the global demographic system indicates that the maximum instability of development may have already been passed. With the long-term stabilization of the population and a radical change in the historical process, one can expect a possible demilitarization of the world with a decrease in the demographic factor in strategic tension and the onset of a new time periodization of history. In defense policy, demographic resources limit the size of armies, which requires modernization of the armed forces. The importance of both technical equipment and the increasing role of what is commonly called psychological warfare techniques is increasing. This is why the role of ideology as the basis of politics is increasing, and because the dissemination of ideas through active propaganda, advertising and culture itself is becoming an increasingly important factor and instrument of modern politics. Thus, in developed countries that have completed the demographic transition, a change in priorities is already visible in defense, economics, education, healthcare, social insurance, policy and media practice.
4.Information nature of human development
We see that humanity since its inception, when it took the path of hyperbolic growth and has steadily developed as an information society. Only in the past did this happen gradually, and growth did not lead to tension and stress, so characteristic of our time. The analysis also shows that it was not resources and the environment, but the limited technology of their production and development that caused the demographic transition. The growth limitation that has come is due to the fact that the ideas necessary for using generalized information have largely been exhausted, and the training, education and upbringing of the next generation requires much more time than before. In other words, we are dealing not only with the explosive development of the information society, but also with its crisis. This is a paradoxical conclusion, but it leads to consequences that are of increasing importance for understanding the processes occurring during the passage through the critical era of the demographic revolution and assessments of the future that awaits us, and here the example of Europe is especially instructive.
Once the world's population has stabilized, development can no longer be linked to numerical growth, and therefore the path it will take must be discussed. Development may stop - and then a period of decline will begin, and the ideas of “The Decline of Europe” will be embodied (see, for example, “Children of the Dead” by Nobel Prize Laureate Elfriede Jelinek). But another, qualitative development is also possible, in which the meaning and goal will be the quality of a person and the quality of the population, and where human capital will be its basis. A number of authors point to this path. And the fact that Oswald Spengler's gloomy forecast for Europe has not yet come true gives hope that the path of development will be connected with knowledge, culture and science. It is the new Europe, many of whose countries were the first to go through the demographic transition, that is now boldly paving the way for the reorganization of its economic, political and scientific space, and indicating the processes that other countries can expect. This critical bifurcation, the choice of development path, faces Russia with all its severity.
Nowadays, all of humanity is experiencing an extraordinary growth in information technology, primarily the widespread spread of network communications, when one third of humanity already owns mobile phones. Finally, the Internet has become an effective mechanism for collective information network interaction, even the materialization of collective memory, if not the very consciousness of humanity, realized at the technological level. These opportunities make new demands on education, when not knowledge, but its understanding becomes the main task of educating the mind and consciousness: Vaclav Havel noted that “the more I know, the less I understand.” But simple application of knowledge does not require deep understanding, which has led to pragmatic simplification and reduction of requirements in the process of mass training. Currently, the duration of education is increasing and often the most creative years of a person, including the years most suitable for starting a family, are spent studying. The increasing responsibility to society in the formation of values, in the presentation of education and knowledge, must be recognized by the media. It is not without reason that some analysts define our era as a time of excessive information load, due to advertising, propaganda and entertainment, as a burden of deliberate consumption of information, for which the media bear no small responsibility. Back in 1965 outstanding Soviet psychologist A.N. Leontyev astutely noted that “an excess of information leads to impoverishment of the soul.”
Naturally, awareness of the information nature of human development attaches special importance to the achievements of science, and in the post-industrial era its importance only increases. Unlike “world” religions, from the very emergence of fundamental scientific knowledge, science has developed as a global phenomenon in world culture. If at the beginning its language was Latin, then French and German, now English has become the language of science. However, the largest growth in the number of scientific workers is currently occurring in China. If we can expect a new breakthrough in world science from Chinese scientists and those who were educated in the USA, Europe and Russia, then in India the export of software products in 2004 amounted to $25 billion, already showing a new example of the international division of labor. In the era of the demographic revolution, with a general increase in production, education and population mobility, economic inequality is also growing - both within developing countries and regionally. On the other hand, in response to the challenge of the demographic imperative, the political processes that govern and stabilize development do not keep pace with economic growth.
Russia in the global demographic context
The demographic situation in Russia is discussed in detail in a collection published under the editorship of A. G. Vishnevsky. Considering the demography of Russia in a global context, we should dwell on three issues, which, in particular, are highlighted in the latest Address of President V.V. Putin to the 2006 Federal Assembly. In the first place, the President highlighted the birth rate crisis, which is determined by the fact that on average there are 1.3 children per woman. With this level of birth rate, the country cannot even maintain the size of its population, which is currently decreasing by 700,000 people annually in Russia. However, low birth rates, as we have seen, are a characteristic feature of all modern developed countries, to which Russia undoubtedly belongs. Therefore, we can believe that this reflects a general crisis, the causes of which lie not only and not so much in material factors, but in the culture and moral state of society. In Russia, of course, material factors and wealth stratification play a significant role, so the proposed measures will help correct the high degree of unevenness in income distribution in our country. However, no less and even a major role belongs to the moral crisis that has emerged in the modern developed world, the crisis of the value system. Unfortunately, in education policy and especially in the media, we completely thoughtlessly import and even propagate ideas that only worsen the situation with the crisis of identity. This is also facilitated by the social position of part of the intelligentsia, who, having received freedom, imagined that this frees them from responsibility to society at such a critical moment in the history of the country and the world.
For Russia, a significant factor is migration, which accounts for up to half of the population increase. Moreover, the working class is also replenished, and with the return of native Russians to their homeland, the country receives people enriched by the experience of other cultures. No less significant is the influx of migrants from indigenous nationalities from neighboring countries, mainly for economic reasons. Thus, migration has become a new and very dynamic phenomenon in the demography of Russia, and one can only note that, as in other countries, in the Russian context many problems are of a similar nature. Thus, in the United States, most new emigrants do not have legal status. In France, the question of the assimilation of emigrants led to their isolation and major unrest. In other words, in this area, the mobility of peoples that has arisen in the modern world within the framework of Russian reality has manifested itself in a similar way. However, in one thing Russia stands out among all developed countries: high mortality among men. The average life expectancy of men in Russia is 58 years - 20 years less than in Japan. The reason for this is, among other things, the sad state of our medicine, or rather the healthcare system, which, undoubtedly, was aggravated by the thoughtless monetarist approach to organizing this area of social protection of citizens, including the inadequacy of pensions. The role of moral factors, the decline in the value of human life in the public consciousness, the growth of alcoholism in the most dangerous forms, smoking and the inability to adapt to new socio-economic conditions are also great here. The consequence of these factors was the disintegration of the family, a catastrophic for the history of Russia increase in the number of street children, which assumed epidemic proportions.
The listed factors are interconnected, as in any complex system, and therefore identifying the main causes of the crisis presents great methodological difficulties. One thing is clear: the world is going through an era of crisis, the scale of which is incomparable to any collisions and catastrophes of the past. That is why the current crisis in Russia is not only the result of its history, but also to a large extent a reflection, or rather a refraction, in our country of the global crisis of the demographic revolution. Moreover, in its history, Russia has reflected many aspects of global history, and therefore it sometimes seems to us that our path is special. But we simply represent a model of the world by our geography, ethnic composition, and religious diversity, and that is why the analysis of global problems is so important for us. Therefore, the history of individual countries has limited meaning for Russia, and this difference in time and space scales, ethnic and historical diversity should be taken into account when we turn to the experience of others.
Conclusion
The study and discussion of the global demographic process led not only to the discovery of the informational nature of the growth mechanism and the expansion of our ideas about the entire development of mankind, but also made it possible to embrace modernity from such a perspective. At the same time, we have highlighted what seems to be common and fundamental in growth, and have redefined the development factors themselves, where information, software - “software” in computer argot - turns out to be, as in computers themselves, the determining factor. As in computers, hardware and material resources, for all their importance, are ultimately not decisive, but only serve as subsystems that support our existence and growth. Our development as a knowledge society from the very beginning is determined precisely by collective mutual influence - culture, generalized programming, which owes to the mind and consciousness of man - what fundamentally distinguishes us from animals.
There is overpopulation and obvious poverty, destitution and hunger in the world, but these are local, local phenomena, and not the result of a global lack of resources. Let's compare India and Argentina: Argentina is 30% smaller than India, which has almost 30 times the population, but Argentina could produce enough food to feed the entire world. At the same time, India now has a year's supply of food stored, while a number of provinces are starving. The point is not in resource limitations, not in the global lack of resources, but in the social mechanisms of distribution of wealth, knowledge and labor, as is the case in Russia. Throughout the entire path of constant hyperbolic growth, humanity as a whole had the necessary resources, otherwise it would have been impossible to achieve the current level of development. Therefore, the limitation should be seen precisely in the limit of information development, which until now has determined our self-similar growth along a hyperbolic trajectory along which the world developed steadily over a million years until 1960. If growth continued further, the world population in 2006 would be amounted to 10 billion, and not 4 billion less. This is the shortage in population that is due to limited growth due to general information factors, and not to a lack of resources, food or energy.
Indeed, throughout history, humanity has been provided with energy. Global energy production has grown twice as fast as population growth, and energy consumption appears to be proportional to the square of the world population and the growth rate itself. If, with the advent of the Industrial Revolution at the beginning of the 19th century. Since the population of the Earth was 1 billion, since then energy production has increased almost 40 times, and by the end of the demographic transition it will increase 4–6 times, and this is not limited by resources and ecology.
Analysis of population growth, which expresses the cumulative result of all economic, social and cultural activities that make up human history, opens the way to understanding this leading global problem. In a world embraced by globalization, consideration of problems such as energy, food, education, healthcare, and the environment should lead to specific and relevant political recommendations that primarily determine the development and security of the world as a whole. This is the need for such an approach when considering the fundamental causes to which humanity owes its development and their consequences. Only a systematic understanding of the entire set of processes, achieved in interdisciplinary research based on a quantitative description of the development of society, can become the first step towards foreseeing and actively managing the future, in which cultural factors and science play a decisive role in the knowledge society. Today, the education system must respond to such a social order from the future, first of all, in educating the most capable and responsible sections of society. The hopes of humanity are connected with this and there are visible grounds for historical optimism as we emerge from the era of the demographic revolution.
Figuratively, the history of mankind reflects the fate of a person who, during a stormy youth, when he studied, fought, got rich, and, having experienced a time of adventure and search, finally marries, finds family and peace. This theme has existed in world literature since the times of Homer and the tales of the Arabian Nights, St. Augustine, Stendhal and Tolstoy. Perhaps, after the crisis of the demographic revolution, humanity will have to come to its senses and calm down. But only the future will show this, and we won’t have to wait long for it.
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Introduction
Conclusion
Bibliography
Introduction
The life activity of any social organism necessarily includes performing the function of maintaining the continuity of the human race. Two main processes are directly related to the performance of this function: fertility and mortality.
Fertility is the process of giving birth to children in a population, creating new generations. Mortality is an equally continuous process of extinction of generations. Being opposite in meaning, fertility and mortality in their unity form the continuous renewal of populations of the species Homo sapiens.
Procreation is one of the main aspects of the life of any biological species. The continuity of the process of renewal of generations presupposes the long-term preservation of a relatively stable equilibrium between the species and the environment.
Everything social is historical. The reproduction of the population is no exception, which goes through several stages in its historical development, corresponding to various types of demographic equilibrium and demographic mechanism. In their unity, the types of demographic equilibrium and demographic mechanism determine the historical types of population reproduction that are adequate to the historically determined economic, social and cultural conditions of society. Changes of such types can be considered as moments of movement from lower to higher forms. Outside of these historical forms, population reproduction does not exist.
The purpose of this work is to characterize the main types of population reproduction and demographic revolutions that led to the replacement of one type of population reproduction with another.
1. Archetype of population reproduction
reproduction population demographic revolution
Humanity begins its historical path in the original ecological conditions inherited from the past. People - even if we talk only about the neoanthropes Homo sapiens, who appeared 35-40 thousand years ago - did not immediately change the world around them. For a long time, like animals, they brought nothing into nature, did not transform anything in it, and had at their disposal only those means of subsistence that could be found ready-made in nature. Therefore, even having separated from the animal world, people, like animals, had to remain in constant balance with all the elements of the natural ecological systems to which they belonged.
The socio-cultural mechanism brought population growth into line with the boundaries prescribed by nature - this is the distinctive feature of the type of population reproduction that directly replaced the reproduction of animals. In the pre-human world, nature not only does not set these boundaries, but also takes care to observe them. At later stages of the development of human society, social control over population reproduction develops in parallel with the expansion of the boundaries of human population growth as a result of human production activities. But humanity takes its first steps on the historical path with a type of population reproduction that is formed “between two worlds”: the goals of demographic regulation are set by nature, the means are provided by society. We will call this initial type the archetype of population reproduction.
The demographic mechanism inherent in the archetype of population reproduction essentially performed the old functions that were performed by the biological mechanism in the animal world. But it contained the potential for adapting the process of reproduction to other equilibrium conditions, opportunities that played a huge role in subsequent historical eras.
The archetype of population reproduction has been poorly studied. The very fact of its existence is nothing more than a hypothesis, in favor of which there is now only a limited number of arguments. The archetype of population reproduction was inextricably linked with the Paleolithic economy and with the social relations that could develop on its extremely narrow basis. The nature of production and social relations since the appearance of Homo sapiens has remained unchanged in its main features, as has the nature of population reproduction and the universal dominance of its archetype.
However, even in the earliest era of human history, productive forces did not stand still, and people’s living conditions evolved very slowly; there was a long accumulation of progressive changes in material conditions and the social organization of people’s lives and activities. Of course, the effect of each individual change could only be very insignificant and could not lead to a change in the economic and social system of primitive society. But as more and more such changes accumulated, elements of the new economy arose and spread, which came into conflict with the old economic system and undermined its foundations.
2. First demographic revolution
The crisis of the entire system of relations, based on the appropriating economy of primitive gatherers, hunters and fishermen, ultimately caused the elimination of these relations and their replacement with new ones. Changes covered all aspects of the life of human society, in particular, they led to the replacement of the archetype of population reproduction with its new historical type - the first demographic revolution.
An important empirical confirmation of the hypothesis of the first demographic revolution is sometimes considered to be a significant acceleration of population growth in the Neolithic era, the transition from almost complete constancy of the population to its significant growth. Considering this fact in the spirit of generally accepted ideas about the modern demographic revolution and giving it a similar interpretation, it is not difficult to come to the conclusion that the progressive economic and social changes that the Neolithic revolution brought with it led to an increase in life expectancy and an expansion of the area of demographic freedom. The mechanism for controlling procreation outcomes remained the same, due to which a certain gap formed between the birth rate and mortality in favor of the birth rate and mortality in favor of the birth rate, which led to accelerated population growth. This idea has been expressed by various authors. However, a more thorough analysis raises doubts about its correctness. The new population growth rates seem high only against the background of the absolutely insignificant growth rates of the Upper Paleolithic era, but in general they are very low. They increased from thousandths to hundredths of a percent per year, which is possible with a very small change in the ratio of births and deaths.
Proponents of the hypothesis of the first demographic revolution usually proceed from the assumption that in the Neolithic era the limit of the maximum available life expectancy (demographic limit) moved back. But another assumption is also possible: this threshold remained the same or moved forward slightly, but the threshold of the minimum life expectancy acceptable for social reasons (non-demographic limitation) changed. After all, the Neolithic Revolution brought with it not only a new economy, it was an era of profound restructuring of all social relations and man himself. From the point of view of population reproduction, perhaps most importantly, this was the era of the widespread and final establishment of the institution of the family.
Although the family arose as a multifunctional institution, the constitutive role in its origin of functions related to procreation is obvious. The unification of various functions in the family did not occur because when this life activity became more complex and diverse, the multifunctional family justified itself in the course of the historical selection of the most rational and effective institutions for its time, and proved its viability in competition with other forms of organizing people's lives.
The decisive role in the victory of the family was probably played by the possibility of expanding the sphere of personal property in the conditions of a producing economy and the transformation of the family into a self-sufficient economic unit, the emergence of inherited property inequality, the exploitation of man by man and other economic and social phenomena unknown to the clan system.
But it is important for you that the family became a family in the full sense of the word only when it combined all the stages of the process of renewing generations from conception to death.
Thanks to this, despite its multifunctionality, it acquired the features of a specialized institution designed to ensure the continuous reproduction of life and its preservation - as opposed to less specialized, syncretic clan institutions.
The transition to a consistently family form of population reproduction is probably the most conducive to the realization of the material opportunities created by the revolution in production that are conducive to the lengthening of human life. It is not just the walls of a more perfect home that now better protect the life of a newborn child, but the entire spirit of the family, lares and penates, which primitive society did not know.
Infanticide ceases to be an undisputed alternative to not having a child. The former demographic relations, hallowed by millennia, are now recognized as unacceptably rude and barbaric; they do not correspond to the new conditions and must be replaced by something else.
3. Transition from traditional to modern type of population reproduction
The new type of population reproduction, which arose during the Neolithic, reigned supreme throughout the world until the 18th century, and among a significant part of the world's population it is still far from being completely eliminated today. The main features of this type of reproduction are inextricably linked with the agricultural economy and the corresponding social relations and culture.
It is difficult to overestimate the role that agriculture, which arose in the Neolithic era, played in human history. It formed the economic basis of all pre-capitalist class modes of production.
However, emphasizing the deep progressiveness of the agricultural economy in comparison with the economy of appropriating societies, it is necessary to immediately point out the historical limitations, the narrowness of the framework that this economy creates for the development of productive forces and changes in people's living conditions.
The “agrarian” type of demographic balance also corresponded to a system of cultural regulators that ensured the maintenance of this balance. Compared to the demographic mechanism of the times of the archetype, these regulators were much more “subtle”, more perfect. But from the standpoint of higher forms of the demographic mechanism, they were very crude and primitive and could not be otherwise, since the possibilities for their development were limited by the relative underdevelopment of all social relations characteristic of agrarian societies. This underdevelopment is a natural consequence of the low level of development of the productive forces and the entire associated way of life of people. Of course, one cannot put on the same level the level of development of social relations with all pre-capitalist methods of production based on exploitation, which, as is known, are “progressive eras of economic social formation”, steps on the path of historical movement from lower to higher. But despite all the - often very important - differences, pre-bourgeois social organisms are characterized by significant common features that predetermine a largely similar position of the individual in society, an equally narrow framework for the development of the human personality. All pre-bourgeois societies are “traditional”, that is, those in which people’s behavior, their relationships with each other, their entire lives are regulated by a tradition accepted on faith and not requiring rational interpretation, focused on repeating unchanging patterns inherited from time immemorial. Reproduction of pre-determined relationships between an individual and a team, the predetermination of his relationships to working conditions, his fellow tribesmen, etc. - not a secondary feature, but, as K. Marx wrote, the basis for the development of all societies in which land ownership and agriculture form the basis of the economic system. The immaturity of the individual person is one of the most important features of such societies. In them, a person appears as dependent, belonging to a larger whole; he is isolated as an individual only as a result of the historical process. But until such separation occurs, in the most diverse areas of his life a person behaves in accordance with petrified rules, with a certain scheme that does not provide for his personal expression of will, his free choice, or rational comprehension of his actions. All the questions that now every adult decides for himself: how to earn his bread, where to live, how to dress, with whom and when to marry, etc. , not so long ago, everywhere in the world they were very strictly resolved for the individual by tradition, custom, parents, sovereign, etc. By imposing on the human mind, they subordinated man to external circumstances, instead of elevating him to the position of master of these circumstances, and turned a self-developing social state into an unchangeable fate predetermined by nature.
Thus, on the one hand, throughout the entire period of dominance of the agrarian economy, the conditions of demographic equilibrium, those objective requirements for the process of population reproduction that stemmed from the socio-economic characteristics of the functioning of agrarian societies, remained largely unchanged. On the other hand, the socio-cultural mechanism by which an individual’s behavior was brought into line with objective social needs remained largely the same. This mechanism regulated the behavior of people in all spheres of their lives, and the area of population reproduction was no exception. The demographic mechanism was part of the entire “traditional” mechanism that regulated the behavior of each individual person; therefore, it was also “traditional.” This gives grounds to call “traditional” the type of population reproduction that is characterized by an “agrarian” type of demographic balance (in contrast to its “gathering” type in pre-Neolithic times) and a “traditional” demographic mechanism. There is, however, some inconsistency in such terminology, since, from the point of view of the principle of operation, the demographic mechanism inherent in the archetype is also traditional. This inconsistency may be resolved when the differences between the archetype and the traditional type of population reproduction are better explored.
Overcoming the traditional type of population reproduction and replacing it with a new historical type, in other words, the second demographic revolution, was prepared by the entire long development of mankind. The immediate conditions that led to the beginning of the demographic revolution matured in the process of decomposition of feudal society in Western Europe. This revolution is one of many revolutions that have taken place over the past centuries, closely interacting with each other and having one common initial basis of production. The revolution in trade, in science, in agriculture, in industry, political revolutions, which brought the bourgeoisie to political power wherever it had previously won economically, destroyed the old economic system, the old social structure, the old ideology, separating an increasingly large part of the population “from agriculture and from the age-old traditions of patriarchal life associated with this.” The narrow production base on which the agrarian economy of pre-capitalist societies rested was overcome. New knowledge and new technology, constantly improving, put into the hands of people more and more powerful and cost-effective tools and means of conscious control over the elemental forces of nature that were previously beyond their control. Ultimately, all these changes irreversibly disrupted the old demographic balance and led to its replacement with a new one.
Not every revolution in the socio-economic sphere is capable of undermining the demographic balance. To do this, the demographic system must be directly affected and the mechanism for managing demographic outcomes must be irreversibly undermined. This has apparently never happened in the entire history of agrarian societies. But now such changes have occurred. In the XVIII-XIX centuries. socio-economic development led to a radical change in the structure of mortality factors, and thereby to its sharp decrease, as a result of which the demographic balance was disrupted. Under capitalism, completely different conditions are created for restoring the disturbed balance and its constant maintenance; the adaptation of the nature and level of the birth rate to the changed nature and level of mortality comes to the fore. As a result, a qualitatively new demographic equilibrium is emerging, its structure, the paths that lead to its establishment are completely different than before, they correspond to new economic conditions, moreover, they are determined by them.
Capitalism has changed not only the conditions of demographic equilibrium, but also the mechanism for maintaining it. The old mechanism for controlling demographic processes was suitable in a traditional society, where the entire system of human behavior was focused on blindly repeating once and for all given patterns. But new times have created a new type of personality, a new person, in whose behavior the main features of new social relations were somehow reflected and imprinted.
The absence of division of labor and trade, self-sufficiency, economic, cultural and territorial isolation are characteristic features of the life of the majority of the population of a traditional society. Man had no choice, no path - economic, social, cultural - different from the path of his fathers and grandfathers. The development of capitalism has undermined the material and social foundations on which the uselessness of choice in past eras rested. It brought with it a previously unprecedented differentiation of human activity, spheres of application and nature of labor, types of settlement, way of life, cultural standards, etc. It gave rise to the diversity and availability of material and spiritual benefits, previously unknown or accessible to few people, which led to in turn, to the continuous emergence and development of diverse needs that people did not know before, and to a large extent made these needs satisfyable. It created a world that was in many ways the opposite of the previous qualitatively limited world - a world of narrow material possibilities, undeveloped social and individual needs, a world of canonized and strictly regulated behavior. Now every decision, every action must be preceded by a choice of one of many competing possibilities; for the individual and for society there must be freedom of choice.
The establishment of such freedom in all areas of human life is fully consistent with the logic of the historical development of capitalism. Capitalist production destroyed all primordial relations preserved from the past; in place of inherited customs and historical law, it replaced buying and selling, free contract. But contracts can be concluded by people who are able to freely dispose of their personality, actions and property and have equal rights in relation to each other. The creation of such free and equal people was precisely one of the most important tasks of capitalist production. Freedom of choice” is affirmed not only in economic relations, but extends to all aspects of people’s lives.
A person who has to make a choice cannot be guided in his actions by fossilized norms of behavior that do not take into account possible changes in external conditions. Behavior based on strict adherence to the traditional pattern gives way to behavior based on the rational motivation of each action. And since such a change in the type of behavior occurs in all spheres of human life, since traditional behavior cannot retain its former significance in the demographic sphere. And here, rationally motivated behavior, consciously oriented toward achieving certain also rational goals, occupies an increasingly important place. Thus, with the transition to an industrial economy, the conditions of the old demographic equilibrium were undermined, the old demographic mechanism was destroyed, and a new demographic equilibrium and a new demographic mechanism emerged. This revolution, during which demographic processes interacted complexly with socio-economic ones. And also among themselves, and constitutes the content of the second demographic revolution. Its result was the emergence of a new historical type of population reproduction, which is called modern, or rational.
Conclusion
Animal reproduction occurs according to natural laws; human reproduction is a socially controlled process. Population reproduction is always a dialectical unity of fertility and mortality. The main features of fertility and mortality, and therefore reproduction as a whole, are determined by the objective conditions of demographic equilibrium and the demographic mechanism by which this equilibrium is maintained. Demographic equilibrium and the demographic mechanism change throughout history. In their unity, they determine the historical type of population reproduction.
With all the diversity of specific conditions in which population reproduction took place in different historical eras, the diversity of socio-cultural norms regulating it and a fairly wide range of quantitative characteristics of this process, three main historical reproductions of the population can be distinguished: an archetype characteristic of a pre-class society living in conditions of appropriation economics; traditional, dominant in pre-industrial societies, the economic basis of which is the agricultural economy; modern, arising in connection with a new leap in the development of productive forces, with the transformation of a predominantly agricultural economy into a predominantly industrial one.
Bibliography
1. Borisov V.A. Demography - M.: NOTA BENE Publishing House, 2009
2. Vishnevsky A.G., Selected demographic works. T.1. Demographic theory and demographic history. M., Nauka, 2005.
3. Maksakovsky V.P., Demographic policy. - M. Demos, 2006.
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Social revolutions of modern times - whether we are talking about bourgeois revolutions at a time when the bourgeoisie was still revolutionary, about proletarian revolutions or about the liberation revolutions of colonial peoples - are inextricably linked with revolutions in the material and spiritual life of society. Summarizing the long-term accumulation of slow quantitative changes and marking a qualitative leap, the birth of new forms of production, a new consciousness, these revolutions have a huge impact on all social development, prepare the victory of social revolutions, and contribute to the consolidation and deepening of their gains. Together with social upheavals, they have a revolutionaryizing influence on the living conditions of man and his consciousness and therefore, in a certain sense, can also be called revolutions. These are the “bourgeois religious revolution” of the 16th century, the scientific revolution of the 17th century, the industrial revolution of the 18th-19th centuries, and the scientific and technological revolution of the 20th century. Among these revolutions, the demographic revolution occupies an important, although not yet fully understood, place.
Demographic history has been studied incomparably less than, say, economic history. This is explained both by the fact that the importance of its study has been realized only very recently, and by the difficulty of studying the demographic past, which left almost no material traces. Nevertheless, through the efforts of demographers, since approximately the beginning of the 20th century, a fairly large number of facts have been accumulated that make it possible, at least in the most general form, to imagine the pattern of demographic development throughout the history of human society. According to this sketchy, very poorly developed scheme, the demographic development of mankind appears in the form of a slow evolution with two “gradual breaks”, with two leaps, two demographic revolutions.
The first demographic revolution occurred in the Neolithic era and was the result of a colossal leap in the development of productive forces - the emergence of cattle breeding and agriculture. This historical revolution in the field of production put the life of people who previously knew only gathering, hunting and fishing on a completely new economic basis. In turn, “the new economic system not only served as the basis for the multiplication of humanity: it accelerated the process, which, due to its striking similarity with the demographic revolution of our time, can be called the “demographic revolution of the Neolithic era.” Mastery of relatively highly productive methods of obtaining food, improvement dwellings, expanding knowledge about the surrounding world significantly weakened man’s dependence on nature, in particular, reduced the previously very high probability of death from hunger, and made it possible to take the first steps in the fight against death.
It is possible that the reduction in mortality was also facilitated by the transition - even during the formation of the clan system - to exogamy, which excluded consanguineous marriages, which increased the viability of the offspring. At the same time, this contributed to an increase in the average number of children born to one woman throughout her life. A decrease in mortality, and possibly an increase in fertility during the era of the formation of the clan system (albeit very insignificant from the point of view of our current understanding) was a significant moment in the demographic history of mankind. However, this type of population reproduction did not reliably ensure even maintaining the population at a constant level. Finding themselves in unfavorable conditions, populations of proto-humans could experience decline and sometimes even complete extinction. Hence the long-term stagnation and lack of noticeable growth in the number of Paleolithic settlements.
The essence of the first demographic revolution lies precisely in the replacement of the archetype with a new type of population reproduction, called the “primitive” type. Although this new type of reproduction is characterized by a very high mortality rate, it is still lower than the mortality rate characteristic of the archetype, making sustainable population growth possible for the first time in human history. No matter how little we know about the demographic processes of such a distant past, it can be considered reliably established that it was in the Neolithic era that population growth began - very slow compared to today's growth rates, but unprecedentedly fast compared to Paleolithic times. Without such growth, neither the expansion of the boundaries of the ecumene that occurred in this era, nor the emergence of densely populated centers of civilization of early class societies, their economy, based on the joint use of a huge number of people, would have been possible.
The first demographic revolution and the resulting population growth were not only a consequence of the development of productive forces, but they themselves constituted one of the important elements of this development, one of the components of the material and technical revolution, which culminated in the formation of a class society that replaced the primitive communal system, economic the conditions of existence of which have undergone significant changes.
The type of population reproduction established as a result of the first demographic revolution then remained unchanged for thousands of years. Of course, the indicators of the reproduction regime experienced significant fluctuations, depending on various external conditions, on perturbation factors of an economic and social nature, and these fluctuations themselves were an integral feature of the primitive type of reproduction. This long evolutionary period of human demographic development was interrupted by a new demographic revolution that began at the end of the 18th century in Western Europe. Below we will focus on this second demographic revolution. It is this demographic revolution that we will keep in mind in the future, even in cases where, for the sake of brevity, the word “second” will be omitted.
The second demographic revolution was prepared by the same historical events as the industrial revolution of the 18th-19th centuries and began simultaneously with it. Both historically and logically, the first act of the demographic revolution was to overcome the traditional mortality rate.
During the era of the dominance of a primitive type of population reproduction, the average life expectancy in most cases apparently fluctuated between 20 and 30 years, more often approaching - under the influence of constant epidemics, famines and wars - to the lower limit, and sometimes even exceeding it. To give a clear idea of the corresponding mortality rate, we note that with an average life expectancy of 25 years, about 30% of newborns do not survive to 1 year, less than half survive to 20 years, and less than 15% survive to 60 years. Only at the end of the evolutionary period, on the eve of the demographic revolution, the average life expectancy of the socially privileged part of the population of some European countries increasingly began to exceed 30 years, but a level of approximately 35 years can be considered the limit achievable under conditions of a “primitive” type of population reproduction.
The decline in mortality that began at the end of the 18th century in some countries of Western and Northern Europe followed from all previous development and, in a sense, summed up the long period of accumulation of slow, evolutionary changes in the living conditions of a person in an ascending bourgeois society. However, in order for such a decline to acquire the character of a revolutionary leap, revolutionary changes had to occur in the very living conditions of people. So it was in reality: the industrial revolution marked the entry of capitalism into a new stage - the stage of industrial capitalism. Meaning, in the words of V.I. Lenin, “the aggravation and expansion of all the dark sides of capitalism,” this revolution nevertheless had enormous progressive significance for its time and contributed, in particular, to colossal changes in the economic conditions of the existence of the European population in the 19th century. The development of industry and agriculture, transport and trade led to a gradual cessation of acute outbreaks of famine, during which mortality rates rose sharply in Western Europe (the last such outbreak, during which about 1 million people died, occurred in Ireland in 1846). A huge role in reducing mortality was played by the development of medicine, which itself experienced a kind of revolution at that time, which began with the discovery (in the last decade of the 18th century) of smallpox vaccination by Edward Jenner and ended in the second half of the 19th century, primarily as a result of the activities of Louis Pasteur, with the introduction of medicine in the "bacteriological era". Since that time, human control over morbidity and mortality began to continuously expand, which, on the one hand, made it possible to completely eliminate the “extraordinary” mortality from periodic epidemics that raged in Europe for thousands of years, on the other hand, created the conditions for a sharp decrease in “normal” mortality . The population of Europe was almost completely freed from the formidable companions of the Middle Ages - smallpox and plague, cholera and typhoid, which were rampant in the 19th century, were suppressed, and the most dangerous childhood disease - diphtheria - was gradually eliminated. Further development of medicine opened the way to victory over malaria, yellow fever, tuberculosis and many other diseases that in the past brought premature death to a huge number of people.
By the end of the 19th century, average life expectancy in most European and some non-European countries exceeded 40, and in some countries even 50 years. Subsequently, the growth of average life expectancy accelerated, as a result of which only during this century in many countries this figure increased by 20-30 years, that is, more than in many millennia of human history, and reached an extremely high level - 70 years or more . With such a life expectancy, no more than 2-3% of newborns die before the age of 1 year, over 90% of them survive to 30 years and over 60% to 70 years.
It is not enough to say that the colossal reduction in mortality was made possible thanks to technological progress and the success of medicine - the development of productive forces made it necessary. The development of large-scale machine production led to the emergence of densely populated industrial centers and large cities that would simply die out from epidemics if control over morbidity and mortality had not been established. On the other hand, the rapid development of technology has increased the economic value of man. If in the early stages of the development of industrial capitalism the unskilled labor of children and women was widely used, then in the later stages the low qualifications of workers turned into a brake on technical progress. No matter how the capitalists clung to the system of exploitation of cheap, unskilled labor, it had to give way to a new approach to the quality of labor, to the costs of its reproduction and preservation, and therefore to new requirements for the duration of human life. In the process of the demographic revolution, the average life expectancy at working age (more precisely, at the age of training and work - in round figures - from 10 to 60 years) increases by almost one and a half times. Before the start of the demographic revolution, less than 80% of those who reached the age of 10 lived to be 30 years old, a little more than half lived to be 45 years old, and by the age of 60 only one third remained alive. At the current mortality rate, approximately 80% of those who have reached the age of 10 survive to 60 years, that is, more than in the past lived to 30 years. These changes have dramatically increased the cost-effectiveness of accumulating, transferring, and using manufacturing experience and knowledge. Without them, a modern education system would hardly be possible, since the costs of training a worker over many years would not be recouped in the relatively short time of his direct participation in production. Without these changes, the modern quality of workers would hardly have been achieved - one of the most important characteristics of the level of development of the productive forces in the era of the scientific and technological revolution. In other words, reducing mortality even under capitalism turns into an urgent socio-economic requirement.
In addition to the economic consequences discussed above, the reduction in mortality also has very important immediate demographic consequences. They consist in the fact that, thanks to a decrease in mortality, an increasing number of children born began to live to the age of their parents, as a result of which each previous generation began to be replaced by the next with a large numerical excess and population growth began to accelerate more and more. Fundamental changes have occurred in the “demographic existence” of people, and for the first time in history it has become possible to consciously limit the birth rate on a significant scale, which by no means jeopardizes the very continuation of the human race.
Here, as with mortality reduction, a distinction must be made between opportunity and necessity. The reduction in mortality has only created the possibility of reducing the birth rate, but its necessity is due to other reasons - it follows directly from economic and social development itself. The question of the reasons for the decline in fertility during the demographic revolution is very complex and cannot be considered here in full. We will touch upon it only partially and only to the extent necessary to show that the decline in the birth rate was due to qualitative changes in living conditions, attitudes of consciousness, determined by the level of development of production and the economic and social progress that followed it. At the same time, we will touch upon the sociocultural motivations of demographic behavior, shifts in social and individual psychology associated with demographic processes only secondarily, since they themselves can form the subject of independent research.
The need to reduce the birth rate was realized at the family level, and this reduction was carried out without any external coercion, which stemmed from the very nature of the family.
Since its inception, the family has simultaneously performed both the function of procreation (demographic function) and the function of reproducing a person of a certain social quality (social function). The uninterrupted performance of these functions at the family level ensured the continuity of demographic and social reproduction at the level of society: the reproduction of the population, on the one hand, and the reproduction of its social structure, on the other.
There have been many cases in history when the demographic and social functions of the family came into conflict with each other. Even a small and temporary decrease in mortality, leading to a slight increase in the number of surviving children and accelerated population growth, brought with it a disruption of the traditional economic and social balance. In the era of feudalism, for example, an increase in the number of heirs came into conflict with generally accepted forms of preserving the inviolability of the social structure, with the fideicommissum, with the principle of indivisibility of flax, with the allotment system of peasant land use, etc. As K. Marx noted, considering the forms preceding capitalist production , “where each individual is entitled to own such and such a number of acres of land, the growth of population already creates an obstacle to this.”
The increase in the number of surviving children began to contradict the aspirations of bourgeois society, because it threatened the integrity of accumulated wealth, in particular, it threatened the fragmentation of small land ownership and therefore was especially felt by the peasantry in those countries where private ownership of land existed.
Such contradictions, as a rule, were quickly recognized at all times and often gave rise to a negative attitude towards a large number of children in the family.
However, the decline in the birth rate took on a massive and general character and constituted the content of the second phase of the demographic revolution only when the increasing number of families with many children came into conflict with the interests of the bulk of the population not connected with the land, with the interests of the urban population and its main component - the working class.
It would seem that it is the working class that represents that part of the population for which there should be no contradiction between the demographic and social functions of the family, if only because the children of workers do not inherit anything, and from this point of view, the number of children for a working family is indifferent. Moreover, in the early stages of the development of industrial capitalism, when early child labor was unusually widespread, large families were even stimulated by “the premium for the production of working children that their exploitation gives.”
This stage of development, however, turns out to be transitory. The development of productive forces is gradually beginning to make demands on the quality of the labor force that can no longer be satisfied with the use of child labor. Moreover, the training of adult workers can no longer be carried out in the same way. In order for workers to function as a vital element of the modern productive forces, the entire conditions of their reproduction as workers had to change, which in turn required changes in the living conditions of the working class. These changes cover various aspects of the life of both an individual and a family, extend to the entire way of life of people, to the conditions of their work, life and use of leisure, to the level of their education and culture, the structure of needs, range of interests, forms of communication, to their class and civic consciousness.
Under socialism, the constant improvement of the living conditions of workers is a conscious goal of society; its achievement at the same time creates the best conditions for the inclusion of the worker in the productive forces. But even under capitalism, the living conditions of working people cannot remain without progressive changes. Although these changes are hindered in every possible way by the resistance of the exploiting classes, they are dictated by the entire course of economic development and must also occur within the framework of capitalism, as long as this social system still continues to exist. Thus, the social environment in which changes in the living conditions of workers occur is completely different under socialism and under capitalism: in the first case they occur due to, and in the second - despite the basic orientation of the social system. But to the extent that changes in people's living conditions are prescribed by the development of productive forces, they are conditioned objectively and are of a universal nature.
Whatever the conditions, such a profound restructuring of the conditions of reproduction of a person as a worker occurs, it takes place within a historically very short time, has the character of an explosion and requires enormous effort and resources - primarily the forces and resources of the family, since the reproduction of people of a new social quality now presupposes an incomparably higher level of education and general culture, better human health and longer preservation of his working capacity, his assimilation of much more complex social norms, etc. Of course, in our time the family shares these functions to a much greater extent than before with society, which has a huge direct influence on the formation of a person, on the selection and education of those qualities that correspond to the interests of a given social system. The inevitable limitation of the family’s material and spiritual resources brings its social function into conflict with its demographic function, for the social task of the family is to increase the intensity of the process of social reproduction, to concentrate all efforts on preparing people who meet certain social and production requirements as closely as possible. An increase in the number of children in a family means an extensive path of family development, pushing it to reduce the quality of social, cultural and professional training of the offspring by increasing its number.
The family recognizes the created conflict as the need to abandon the previous high birth rate. Such a refusal allows her to continue to perform her social functions, but at the same time does not mean the cessation of performing demographic functions and does not violate the interests of procreation. By giving up having many children, a family does not become childless. Thanks to the reduction in mortality, the birth of 2-3 children per family, from the point of view of population reproduction, is equivalent to the birth of 5-7 children before the start of the demographic revolution. The number of surviving children remains approximately the same as before, but due to the absence of demographic cataclysms such as terrible epidemics and famines of the Middle Ages, expanded population reproduction is ensured more reliably than ever in the past.
If we now try to briefly characterize the essence of the demographic revolution, then it should be said that, just as a revolution in the field of technology - industrial or scientific-technical - means a revolution (using the words of F. Engels) in the “production of the means of subsistence: food, clothing, housing and the tools necessary for this,” so the demographic revolution is a revolution in “the production of man himself, the continuation of the family.”
The content of the second demographic revolution is the replacement of the traditional primitive type of population reproduction, which is characterized by the lack of effective control over mortality and fertility and, as a consequence, their high level, with a completely new, “modern” type of reproduction, which is characterized by effective control over mortality and fertility and how the consequence is a low level of both. Population reproduction is rising to a qualitatively new level: it is becoming incomparably more rational, efficient, economical than ever in the past, and this rationalization does not occur gradually, but as a result of a truly huge leap from one level of fertility and mortality to another.
Being an element of a historical revolution that covered both sides of “production and reproduction of immediate life,” the demographic revolution, with its consequences, affects the most diverse spheres of social life. These consequences, closely intertwined and interacting with the consequences of the industrial and then scientific and technological revolution, on the one hand, and with the consequences of social revolutions, on the other, also exert their revolutionary influence on all social development.
We have already talked above about the direct impact of reducing mortality on the development of production, but its consequences are not limited to just the direct impact on the productive forces, they are much broader. The decline in mortality was one of the most striking manifestations of the victory of the human mind over the blind forces of nature. It played a huge role in overcoming the psychology of passivity and humility characteristic of medieval man, mysticism and predestination; Without it, the formation of a new worldview and a new attitude, revolutionary activity, free-thinking and optimism of the working masses would be unthinkable.
No less important are the consequences of declining birth rates. It is the decrease in the birth rate following the decrease in mortality that completes the rationalization of the process of population reproduction and makes it incomparably more economical. Only now a woman, who at all times has been a real “child-bearing machine,” for the first time in history has the opportunity to fulfill her demographic functions with incomparably less effort, time and health than before. A huge amount of social energy is released, which was previously spent extremely irrationally, and this serves as one of the main prerequisites for the true social emancipation of women, her mass participation in social production, the growth of her culture and intelligence, her inclusion in the active struggle for her class and civil rights under capitalism and its equality under socialism. The new role of women undermines one of the most ancient and stable forms of domination of man over man - the domination of men over women, the elimination of which is a necessary moment for the destruction of all forms of oppression in general. The rationalization of the process of population reproduction and the resulting new position of women expands the possibilities of raising children in the family, which becomes qualitatively different, and thereby contributes to a more complete development of the individual and the satisfaction of the growing demands of production on the level of training of workers.
The historical significance of the demographic revolution lies in the fact that, having replaced one type of population reproduction with another, it brought demographic reproduction into line with new technical, economic and social conditions, which turned out to be as incompatible with the primitive type of population reproduction as, say, with the system of subsistence farms. The capitalist mode of production would not have been able to develop beyond a certain level if the irrational primitive reproduction of the population continued to exist. The coincidence in time of the beginning of the demographic revolution and the beginning of the era of industrial capitalism can hardly be considered an accident. To an even greater extent, the demographic revolution is a necessary condition for the development of the socialist mode of production and socialist society, which by its nature is oriented towards the unlimited development of productive forces and at the same time strives for a more complete blossoming of the human personality.
One could, apparently, point out a number of specific consequences of the demographic revolution as a whole or its individual elements, but what has been said is apparently enough to assess its significance. However, the historical significance of the demographic revolution can apparently be looked at more broadly. The development of material productive forces, which underlies all historical development in general, affected primarily the economy of the production of things: the instruments of production were improved, the range of natural resources included in economic circulation expanded, methods of cultivating the land were improved, etc. But the main productive force of society is people. Twice throughout history, revolutions in the material conditions of production affected the “economy” of human production, and this undoubtedly contributed to the fact that such revolutions, with which the emergence and liquidation of class society are associated, acquired a particularly grandiose scale. Assessing the historical significance of the second demographic revolution, we can say that while the first demographic revolution was an integral part of the great material and technical revolution that led to the emergence of class society, the second demographic revolution is an element of the great material and technical revolution leading ultimately to the disappearance of this society.
The replacement of the old type of reproduction with a new one cannot happen immediately; it occurs gradually over the life of several generations of people. Therefore, with the beginning of the demographic revolution, the population enters a more or less long period, during which intermediate, transitional characteristics of population reproduction are observed, combining the characteristics of the old and new types of demographic reproduction - the period of demographic transition. The demographic transition includes two main phases: a phase of declining mortality and a phase of declining fertility. In order for the demographic revolution to take place, both of these declines must occur, and in this sense, the demographic revolution occurs everywhere in the same way. But the speed of each of these declines, their interaction with each other, the sequence of their spread to various layers of society depend on a number of specific historical factors, including, as will be shown below, largely determined by the social system. Therefore, the demographic transition in different historical conditions can (and does) proceed differently, and the specific features of the demographic transition in a particular country are of independent importance.
In most cases, the second phase of the transition (decrease in fertility) begins more or less long after the start of its first phase (decrease in mortality). During this time, the decreasing mortality rate corresponds to a consistently high birth rate, resulting in an acceleration of population growth. This acceleration continues until the second phase of the transition begins, after which the acceleration of population growth stops, and as the decline in fertility catches up with the decline in mortality (and sometimes even overtakes it), population growth slows, returning to approximately rates that were observed before the start of the demographic revolution.
Thus, in the process of demographic transition, the population, as a rule, experiences a period of unprecedentedly rapid growth, so that its numbers in less than a century can grow much more than in its entire previous history. This huge increase in population in a short period of time is called the “population explosion.” The power of such an “explosion” depends on the specific situation in which the demographic transition is taking place.
Historical experience allows us to identify three typical patterns of demographic transition. The first type can be illustrated by the example of France, where (almost an exceptional case) both phases of the transition began almost simultaneously, the decline in mortality and fertility proceeded almost in parallel, due to which France did not experience a “demographic explosion.”
Examples of the second type of demographic transition are provided by England, Sweden and a number of other Western European countries. Here the decline in mortality began at the same time as in France, the decline in birth rates - a hundred years later. This explains the European “population explosion” of the 19th century, a typical illustration of which is the demographic development of England. Its population in 1800 was (without Northern Ireland) 10.9 million people (40% of the population of France). During the 19th century, the population of England grew by almost 26 million people, or 3.4 times (the population of France - by a little more than 40%), and at the same time several million more people emigrated overseas. In Western Europe, the “population explosion” ceased at the beginning of the 20th century as a result of a sharp and very rapid decline in the birth rate, which for some time even created the idea of depopulation in some countries.
Finally, the third type of demographic transition is characteristic of developing countries in our time. The mortality rate in these countries is falling very quickly and in many of them it is now significantly lower than anywhere else in the 19th century; the second phase of the transition is, at best, just beginning, and even then, apparently, not everywhere. Therefore, the excess of the birth rate over the death rate reaches enormous proportions, and the power of the “demographic explosion” far exceeds everything known so far.
The “demographic explosion”, therefore, is not a consequence of the demographic revolution as such (using the example of France, we saw that this revolution can be carried out without a “demographic explosion”), but follows from the specific nature of the demographic transition, from its specificity, closely related to economic and social conditions of the countries in which it takes place. But, ultimately, the “demographic explosion” is still generated by the demographic revolution, therefore an assessment of the consequences of the “demographic explosion” should be included in the assessment of the significance of the demographic revolution as a whole.
The European "population explosion" began in the middle of the last century. The population of foreign Europe, which was 195 million people in 1850, increased by 200 million people over the next 100 years. And this, despite the huge losses in two world wars, which cost the European population tens of millions of human lives, and the emigration of at least 50-60 million people overseas. But the population of overseas Europe in 1850 was only 15-20% of the world population. In our century, a "population explosion" - and, as we have seen, of much greater force - is occurring in areas of the world that by 1950 were home to approximately 70% of the world's population. It is not surprising that the world population, which was 1.6 billion in 1900, increased by 2 billion by 1970, and is projected to grow by 4-6 billion in just a century.
There is no doubt that these immediate consequences of the demographic revolution are very important. Humanity is already faced with complex economic, environmental and other problems that are becoming more acute mainly in those areas of the world where poverty and economic backwardness are delaying the entry into the second phase of the demographic transition, which, in turn, is slowing down socio-economic transformations in these areas. areas. The concern of world public opinion about the observed and possible in the near future consequences of the “demographic explosion” has serious grounds, and it is deeply wrong to reduce it, as is sometimes done, only to a new relapse of Malthusianism.
But it would be a mistake, recognizing the seriousness and severity of the problems generated by the “demographic explosion”, to exclude the possibility of its more distant, but also more important consequences. Unlike animal populations, the population does not react to environmental resistance by reducing its numbers, but is able to overcome this resistance, of course, within the limits determined by the level of development of material productive forces and the social system. The struggle of man with the forces of nature, aimed at expanding the use of natural resources in his own interests, is one of the main prerequisites for the development of production in general, and population growth is the most important incentive that encourages such a struggle, sometimes to unexpected turns in its course. One of these turns was the mass settlement of the New World in the 19th century, which led, in particular, to the creation of the most powerful power in the capitalist world and gave a powerful impetus to the development of productive forces within the framework of the capitalist economic system, which was already losing its progressive character. In turn, the settlement of the New World was closely connected with the European “population explosion” of the 19th century.
But the modern "population explosion" cannot be compared with what happened in Europe in the last century. Demographic mass is itself an economic and environmental factor, just like population density. A huge increase in human resources on our planet can play the role of one of the main material conditions for a new revolution in the field of production, a new leap in the development of human civilization, in any case, no less than the role played in the history of mankind by population growth in the Neolithic era.
We have seen that the demographic revolution, both in its content and in the sense of the sequence of its stages, is closely connected with the development of the productive forces, and when the latter reaches a certain level, it cannot but occur. Therefore, it is completely natural that, having begun at the end of the 18th century in the most developed capitalist countries of that time, the demographic revolution throughout the 19th century spread to more and more countries that took the path of capitalist development. In the 20th century, it occurred very intensively in socialist countries, and from the middle of the 20th century it also spread to developing countries, thus becoming a worldwide phenomenon.
However, if the material prerequisites for the demographic revolution associated with the development of productive forces may be approximately the same in countries with different social systems, then the social conditions in which it takes place are profoundly different, which introduces significant differences into the very course of the demographic revolution. In what specific forms, at what speed, in what social atmosphere does this revolution take place and what impact does it have on overall socio-economic development, how is it reflected by consciousness, depends greatly on the social system.
It is no coincidence that the rapid spread of intra-family birth control, which leads to the inevitable collapse of artificially created or supported institutions, traditions, etc., which have long been unjustified by objective conditions, is perceived by the individualistic petty-bourgeois consciousness as the collapse of all moral foundations of society and leads to the degradation of the bourgeois family , the extremes of the “sexual revolution”, etc.
Under specific conditions, a demographic revolution is taking place in developing countries. Since these countries are, to one degree or another, involved in the technical and cultural achievements of economically developed countries and are themselves gradually being included in the general movement along the path of scientific and technological progress, the demographic revolution could not help but spread to them.
Only in the middle of this century did the bulk of the population of the “third world” enter the first phase of the demographic transition, but even today its mortality rate remains very high. In such large Asian countries as India, Indonesia, Burma, the average life expectancy remains significantly below 50 years, while in many areas of Africa it has not yet reached 40 years. Still, even at this level of mortality, the second phase of the demographic transition may well begin - the phase of declining fertility, but almost nowhere in the “third world” this phase has not yet begun. Apparently, the general level of development here has not yet been reached at which the population itself realizes the need to reduce the number of children in the family. Therefore, the question of the forms and rates of socio-economic development, extremely important in itself, is also cardinal from the point of view of the further development of the demographic revolution in the countries of the “third world”.
On the other hand, it should be noted that the slowdown in the development of the demographic revolution itself, to a certain extent, slows down socio-economic transformations, not only because accelerating population growth creates additional economic difficulties, but also because the traditional demographic structure serves as one of the cornerstones of those outdated economic and social forms, without the destruction of which it is impossible to completely overcome centuries-old and millennia-old backwardness.
The transition to socialism radically changes the conditions for the demographic revolution, as evidenced by the experience of our country. The demographic revolution in the USSR began at the end of the last century, when a fairly rapid and widespread decline in mortality was recorded. However, under the conditions of capitalism, which is also burdened with a huge number of feudal remnants, the absorption of the bulk of the working and peasant population into the first phase of the demographic transition was extremely slow. On the eve of the Great October Socialist Revolution, there were huge differences in the mortality rates of different social groups. The elimination of social inequality in the USSR and the rapid growth of the socialist economy created the basis for a rapid and general reduction in mortality. The rapidly developing economy provided the growing population with the necessary conditions of production and means of subsistence.
From what has been said, of course, it does not follow that under socialism there are no demographic problems, including problems associated with the implementation of the demographic revolution. In addition, there may be demographic problems associated not with the demographic revolution, but with the need to maintain the best, from the point of view of society, regime of population reproduction within the framework of the modern type of reproduction, which is established as a result of the demographic revolution, because the spontaneously emerging regime of population reproduction may be far from optimal. But such problems in a socialist society are solved on a socially consistent basis, and the success and speed of their solution largely depend on how deeply the objective laws of demographic development are understood and how fully they are taken into account when developing and implementing plans and programs for socio-economic development. Hence the need for a careful study of demographic problems in general and the problems of the demographic revolution, which constitutes the main content of the current stage of demographic development in particular.
“Know, understand, evaluate, change” - this is how Adolphe Landry defined the tasks of demography, who introduced the concept of “demographic revolution” into science. This is how we understand them too.
The demographic revolution is a phenomenon of world-historical proportions, and without a deep and comprehensive assessment of all the consequences that arise from revolutionary changes in the demographic field, it is impossible to correctly judge the social processes taking place in the modern world and foresee their future.
1 - Questions of Philosophy, 1973, 2, p. 53-64. Translations: The Demographic Revolution // Population Problems. Issue Two. Problems of the Contemporary World, Moscow, 1974, 1(26): 116-129; La révolution démographique // Problèmes de la population. II e livraison. Problèmes du monde contemporain, Moscow, 1974, 1(25): 121-133; Die demographische Revolution // Sowietwissenschaft. Gesellschatswissenschaftliche Beiträge, Berlin, 1973, 6: 633-645; Die demographische Revolutionen. Theorie und Methode III. Demographie. Einführung in die marxistische Befölkerungswissenschaft. Frankfurt am Main. Herausgegeben vom Institut für Marxistische Stuiden und Forschungen (IMSF), 1980: 40-45.
The crisis of the entire system of relations, based on the appropriating economy of primitive gatherers, hunters and fishermen, ultimately caused the elimination of these relations and their replacement with new ones. Changes covered all aspects of the life of human society, in particular, they led to the replacement of the archetype of population reproduction with its new historical type - the first demographic revolution.
An important empirical confirmation of the hypothesis of the first demographic revolution is sometimes considered to be a significant acceleration of population growth in the Neolithic era, the transition from almost complete constancy of the population to its significant growth. Considering this fact in the spirit of generally accepted ideas about the modern demographic revolution and giving it a similar interpretation, it is not difficult to come to the conclusion that the progressive economic and social changes that the Neolithic revolution brought with it led to an increase in life expectancy and an expansion of the area of demographic freedom. The mechanism for controlling procreation outcomes remained the same, due to which a certain gap formed between the birth rate and mortality in favor of the birth rate and mortality in favor of the birth rate, which led to accelerated population growth. This idea has been expressed by various authors. However, a more thorough analysis raises doubts about its correctness. The new population growth rates seem high only against the background of the absolutely insignificant growth rates of the Upper Paleolithic era, but in general they are very low. They increased from thousandths to hundredths of a percent per year, which is possible with a very small change in the ratio of births and deaths.
Proponents of the hypothesis of the first demographic revolution usually proceed from the assumption that in the Neolithic era the limit of the maximum available life expectancy (demographic limit) moved back. But another assumption is also possible: this threshold remained the same or moved forward slightly, but the threshold of the minimum life expectancy acceptable for social reasons (non-demographic limitation) changed. After all, the Neolithic Revolution brought with it not only a new economy, it was an era of profound restructuring of all social relations and man himself. From the point of view of population reproduction, perhaps most importantly, this was the era of the widespread and final establishment of the institution of the family.
Although the family arose as a multifunctional institution, the constitutive role in its origin of functions related to procreation is obvious. The unification of various functions in the family did not occur because when this life activity became more complex and diverse, the multifunctional family justified itself in the course of the historical selection of the most rational and effective institutions for its time, and proved its viability in competition with other forms of organizing people's lives.
The decisive role in the victory of the family was probably played by the possibility of expanding the sphere of personal property in the conditions of a producing economy and the transformation of the family into a self-sufficient economic unit, the emergence of inherited property inequality, the exploitation of man by man and other economic and social phenomena unknown to the clan system.
But it is important for you that the family became a family in the full sense of the word only when it combined all the stages of the process of renewing generations from conception to death.
Thanks to this, despite its multifunctionality, it acquired the features of a specialized institution designed to ensure the continuous reproduction of life and its preservation - as opposed to less specialized, syncretic clan institutions.
The transition to a consistently family form of population reproduction is probably the most conducive to the realization of the material opportunities created by the revolution in production that are conducive to the lengthening of human life. It is not just the walls of a more perfect home that now better protect the life of a newborn child, but the entire spirit of the family, lares and penates, which primitive society did not know.
Infanticide ceases to be an undisputed alternative to not having a child. The former demographic relations, hallowed by millennia, are now recognized as unacceptably rude and barbaric; they do not correspond to the new conditions and must be replaced by something else.
