Demography

DEMOGRAPHY. - In a broad sense, it is the application of statistical, that is, quantitative, methods to the phenomena of population: it therefore finds concrete expression, fundamentally, in methods held to be fruitful or that are, in any case, widely employed in the quantitative study of demographic phenomena (natality, mortality, nuptiality, migration, etc.).

The investigative character of demography takes shape in the study and the search for laws, that is, for statistical regularities, that the morphology and the biological-social functions of the population may manifest: a study and search that are generally the work of the scientist, conducted on data today predominantly collected, processed and presented by national and international statistical bodies according to a technique that distinctly assumes the state of the population and the movement of the population.

For the study of the state of the population, that is, of its numerical consistency at a given moment, of its internal composition according to individual characteristics and in relation to a determined territory, censuses are chiefly of service: vast demographic inquiries that, sporadic in the past, in modern times are conducted in civilized countries at equal intervals of time, cover the entire territory of a State and all the persons who inhabit it at a given moment. They thus assume three principal characteristics: periodicity, universality and simultaneity.

From the original statistics of the population at a given moment, for example the number of living persons, it is easy to derive other data, for this reason called derivative, which equally represent a present state of things, for example masculinity, that is, the ratio of the number of males to that of females at the time of the census.

The movement of the population consists in the process of variation of the state of the population as a consequence of movements: a) internal: births and deaths; b) external: migrations of entry and of exit. Only in these are the direct active and passive elements identified, from whose balance the demographic equilibrium of the country results: whence they are also called constitutive variations.

A distribution of the living is the effect of the combined play of natality, mortality and migratory movements. Evidently, one crosses the boundaries assigned to the expression "movement of the population" if one follows the custom of statistical sources of placing, alongside internal movements, certain facts (marriages, divorces, legitimations, and so on) that modify the essence of the qualitative, juridical-social relations of the members of the collectivity observed, but leave it quantitatively unchanged. The origin of this custom must be sought in the commonality of the so-called registers of civil status and of the bodies - civil status offices - ordinarily of an official character, which attend to the collection of quantitative variations and of qualitative variations.

Now, demography, in more general terms than those previously fixed, investigates the position and the resolution of the statistical problems that concern the form and the biological and social activity of human collectivities: problems that by and large can be viewed from a twofold point of view, namely, by considering the phenomena of the population in their global manifestations, or by seeking to understand them as the overall effect of a set of elementary circumstances that reside in the qualities and properties of individuals. In concrete terms, in demographic investigations there is nothing absolute: dynamic surveys (proper to the offices of civil status) are used, often jointly with static surveys (made with censuses: operations of very ancient origin, having at the beginning fiscal and military purposes, or, later, when the Milanese councils under St. Charles Borromeo prescribed the periodic formation of the "states of souls", religious ones).

Direct methods and indirect methods devised later for the calculation of the population in intercensal intervals are often applied with some reworkings, variable especially according to the hypotheses that are admitted concerning the law of variation of the population between two successive known states.

By then extending (with appropriate extrapolative procedures) to the future the trends of natality and mortality ascertained in the past for groups of population chosen according to age and according to sex ascertained in the past - more or less recent according to the extent of the future to which the forecasts are to be extended - hypothetical data are derived concerning the overall amount and the composition of populations in the future. The forecasts are, obviously, differently reliable according to the hypotheses assumed, and these vary greatly as a function of demographic dynamics, often very different from country to country (progressive, regressive, stationary populations).

However, whatever the characteristics of development of the different populations, it is by now an established fact in demographic investigations - whether macroscopic, that is, concerning populations of relatively restricted territories, or macroscopic, that is, concerning populations of comparatively ample territories - the decline, through time, of the fundamental rates of demographic dynamics, that is, of natality rates and of mortality rates: from whose difference in successive intervals of time the rate of development of a population results.

But, since the range of variation of the natality rate is wider than that of the mortality rate (natality can even be equal to zero in the case of full application of contraceptive practices in procreation; mortality cannot fall below the limit imposed by the nature of the human organism), in the last century while the mortality rate has notably fallen through hygienic, sanitary, therapeutic improvements, etc., far more notably the natality rate has declined through the ever wider recourse to the voluntary limitation of offspring (to which, according to some, a depression of the reproductive capacity of the species would be accompanied): in short, one is witnessing an ever smaller annual excess, in absolute figures, of births over deaths in the most diverse countries of the world, particularly in the countries of Western Europe.

The German G. P. Süssmilch (1707-67), the Italian G. M. Ortes (1713-90) and the Englishman T. R. Malthus (1766-1834) constructed the center of a system of criteria for the study of the development of populations having its foundation in a divine order and in human factors suited to second it (the thinning out or the postponement of marriages and chastity): so that the equilibrium between the development of the population and the development of the means of subsistence may be assured and the otherwise inevitable misery may be vanquished.

With a not always involuntary moral degeneration of this complex of principles (especially as the principle contained in Malthus's propositions degenerated), an attempt has been made to legitimize the widespread practice of contraception or, ultimately, of birth control (as is quite evident from the decline, over time, in the fertility of married women and from the ever-increasing spread of the voluntary limitation of offspring from the higher social strata to the economically and professionally less endowed strata). Thus demographic dynamics evolve with variations clearly smaller than those of economic dynamics, and a serious economic-demographic imbalance comes to be determined, the fruit of what has been defined as the "philosophy of fear," that is, of the concern about an imbalance between the rate of growth of the population and that of the growth of subsistence means, in the sense that the development of the latter cannot allow a development of the former. It is a philosophy that, alongside a systematic decrease in the overall population of the various countries, is leading above all to a thinning of the economically active population and, with the aging of populations, to an aggravation of the social burden on the groups of the economically active as a consequence of the number of the elderly, that is, of the economically inactive, which is on the increase.

The weakening of vitality, as an examination of the birth rate in the various French departments and the various Italian regions would seem to bring to light, is the fruit of the lowered vigor of the religious and moral sense in certain territories.

When religion does not sustain one in bearing the burden of offspring, the woman shrinks from motherhood and the man from the cares of the domestic hearth. From this point one thinks less of the future than of oneself, less of improving oneself than of enjoying oneself, and every ambition that requires energy is nullified. Life lowers in tone; it is reduced to the love of matter, and one ends by forgetting that divine art is the continuation of the species. That is, in order to live one loses the reason for living: "et propter vitam vivendi perdere causas."

Giovanni Lasorsa