Ian Pool

Te Iwi Maori, a New Zealand Population, Past, Present and Projected

This important new book gives a thorough and very interesting survey of the history of the Maori population from earliest times to the present, concentrating particularly on the demographic impact of European colonization. It also considers present and future population trends, many of which have major implications for social and resource policy. Among questions explored are the marked fertility decline of the 1970s, urbanization, emigration, especially to Australia, and regional population patterns.

The Baby Boom in New Zealand and Other Western Developed Countries

The Baby Boom was undoubtedly one of the more emblematic events of the twentieth century. As it was a distinctly demographic phenomenon, it has been dissected by some of the most distinguished of demographers. Yet its greatest influence is not in demography, but in fields like marketing, pop-psychology, and even gerontology: the Baby-Boomers rather than the generation currently at reproductive ages are blamed for structural ageing. This paper questions aspects of Baby-Boom mythology. It asks how it has been measured: a boom suggests numerical volume, yet instead we measure flows. It questions whether the hegemonic model of the boom — the American one that has effectively delineated its parameters in Europe, Australisia and Japan, both among demographers and in the popular media — really does apply to other countries. It also asks whether or not Western Europes limited surges in births really qualify as booms in the strict sense of the term. Finally, it raises questions more in the field of the sociology of knowledge: the way the Baby Boom mythology has spread often in the face of counterfactual evidence.This paper is a revised version of the Australian Population Associations 2006 Borrie Lecture.

Age-Structural Transitions, Population Waves and “Political Arithmetick”

This book is about age structural transitions and their policy implications in the 21 century. The book’s central thesis is that the population age structure in most countries around the world is undergoing cyclical, often irregular, change that will persist for many decades. These changing age structures will shape changes in human, social, institutional and economic needs and capacities, and pose significant challenges to policy makers. The description, analysis and prediction of these changes call for new methods and perspectives in several directions that are the subject of the chapters in this book. First, this book demonstrates that in virtually all countries over the coming decades age structural transitions will affect cohorts at all stages of the life cycle, not just the young or the old. Second, this book shows explicitly how to use analyses of human capital and human development as a way to link age structural transitions to policy needs and

Age-Structural Transitions in Industrialized Countries

This chapter analyzes some of the demographic complexities in the dynamic process of population ageing in industrialized countries. It demonstrates, using the United Nations population projection results, that age-structural transitions involve the movement of waves and troughs through the age pyramid and that there are variations in the speed and timing of transition and the intensity of the waves. The analysis finds that in the majority of developed Western countries the modal age groups will remain below old age or even as low as early middle ages, which is a markedly different picture produced on the basis of the conventional demographic measure such as the proportion 65 and over. At the end-point of an age-structural transition, the conventional demographic index tends to produce a bleak outlook, leading to an over-dramatization of the ageing issues and to panic among policy makers. As an important policy implication, Pool stresses that the multiple age compositional oscillations to be generated in the process of population ageing would require public and private responses that could lead to reallocations of resources between generations. In addition, as demographic policy responses to population ageing, he discusses the feasibility of promoting international migration and boosting fertility. It is axiomatic among demographers that declining fertility, not increased life expectancy, is the principal determinant of population ageing. It should be emphasized, however, that the contribution of mortality improvement to the ageing process becomes increasingly important over time, especially when life expectancy at birth exceeds 70 years. In Japan, for example, the mortality effect on population ageing is expected to become dominant over the fertility effect sometime between 2005 and 2010. For this reason, accurate projection of the future mortality trajectory is increasingly important for social security reform in Japan. This observation applies to many other industrialized countries.

Jack Caldwell 1928-2016.

Jack Caldwell, who died on 12 March this year, made contributions to demography that have had a uniquely important influence on the discipline. Here we publish an account of his career by former co...

Demographic Ephemera, 1769–1840

Victorian Pakeha settlers spent a lot of energy describing the social pathologies they saw as ‘common’ among Maori; the recent tabloid historians seem dedicated to repainting Maori society as turbulent, venal and ‘given’ over to every possible vice and barbarism. ‘Drug-taking’ seems to have been just about the only pathology Victorians missed off the list. But perhaps opiate use was far too ‘respectable’ a behaviour to be attributed to mere ‘savages’ for opium – ‘laudanum’ – was widely used by the British middle and upper classes by ladies of ‘delicate disposition’. It is highly probable that all of suicide, abortion, infanticide, suicide and cannibalism did occur in Maori society before and/or after contact. Moreover, after contact drunkenness and sexual encounters between Maori and Pakeha seem well enough documented (O’Malley 2012: 148–149, 183), although as Maori seem traditionally not to have used any drug or alcoholic drink, drunkenness would have been very much an adopted pathology. But the real question here, for alcohol and a whole range of behaviours, is not whether Maori ‘partook’ in such activities, but whether or not the ‘partaking’ was frequent enough to have had impacts on Maori population numbers, mortality and fertility.

Maori: The ‘Dying Race’; Pakeha: Surgent

To set the scene for later chapters, the present one maps estimated population trends for both Maori and Pakeha, and the scenarios that allowed Maori estimates to be made. It asks why Pakeha population trends were so surgent, setting them against Maori trends in what was a demographically polarised colony. The Pakeha population explosion not only changed the Maori-Pakeha demographic balance, but also had an impact on Maori health because the settler inflows meant that Maori were more frequently exposed to greater volumes of introduced pathogens. Essentially, health services were woefully inadequate for Pakeha and worse for Maori. Even had they been better, they could not have countered the effects of deprivation – the key determinant of differentials in that era – faced by Maori because of resource losses.

Health & Wealth, Population & Development

To escape the under-development trap in which they were caught in the late nineteenth century, Maori first had to survive as a population. By 1900, survival seemed statistically more assured, although at a popular level, as in cartoons, the ‘passing of the Maori’ was still being mooted (O’Malley et al. 2010: 219). This chapter documents the interrelationships between health, as indicated by ‘survival’, and development. It reviews an emerging body of theory coming out of conventional economics, which shows that health is a central factor of development. It explores links between health and Gross Domestic Product (GDP), arguing that, in the absence of most economic data, health variables, especially early childhood mortality, might suggest levels of GDP. Childhood survivorship is strongly linked to economic and social change, more directly so than life-expectancy. Maori life-table statistics generated by indirect estimation techniques (Pool and Cheung 2004, 2005), along with others relating to rural Maori wealth – and almost all Maori were rural at this time – are used to posit possible levels of income per capita. Finally, this chapter discusses gender differentials in longevity. Until and including 1945, the available vital registration data, once they became more complete, allow direct computation of life-tables for Maori and show higher male than female life expectation; post-1945 the reverse is true. This has implications for the analysis of nineteenth century Maori deathrates. Should we assume that the same sex-differential persisted until 1945?

Factors Affecting Maori Survival, 1840–1901

This chapter shifts the focus from demographic trends overall to one component of population change – the determinants and consequences of mortality trends. In this, it pays particular attention to the bio-demography of mortality – why diseases had such a severe impact on Maori and how a turnaround in death rates occurred. Attention is also paid to the relationships between land alienation and mortality. Additionally, it charts the fatality rates due to warfare. Changes in fertility levels played little role in driving population trends in this period. Initially, rates for Maori were in the upper medium range, but, later in the colonial period, once the virulence of introduced venereal diseases had diminished, they moved into the high range (5.0+ births per woman), only a modest shift. Instead, demographic change was driven primarily by death rates, which are, of course, the ultimate measure of health levels. For that reason, the causes and consequences of high rates of mortality must be the focus of any population history of the colonial era.

Just Surviving – Not Thriving

This book has dealt with one major substantive issue – population and development. The history is one of population numbers declining, but nevertheless surviving to reach stationarity at the very last moment – that part of the story of the Seeds of Rangiatea had a happy, although cliff-hanger, ending. But the plot for Maori development was less positive. Maori commerce was robust for about 40 years, as it grew after contact (1769), peaked in the 1840s and 1850s, then declined. But from 1840 the fundamental base of Maori wealth, the land, was transferred almost in its entirety – at least the more productive areas – to Pakeha settlers. This left Maori in 1900 as a dismembered remnant population with little wealth, and even less that was viable commercially. Population and development are just two among a number of ‘tangible’ dimensions nested into what has emerged as this book’s substantive meta-issue, ‘colonization’. Other meta-issues, typically more theoretical and methodological than substantive, have emerged here, notably the explanatory power of transition frameworks that are used in demography and economics. But there are yet other questions, more in the nature of ‘intangibles’, that were not addressed here, even though they may be fundamental to an understanding of ‘colonization’ and social change in general. Mana Maori is probably the most significant of these powerful ‘intangibles’, but an in-depth exploration of this theme awaits someone with expertise in ontology and related fields and Maori language skills.