Canning and Szreter both talk about how models/theories of demographic transition are based on and work for higher-resource (and white dominant) settings, and then are retrofit and don't really work for other settings. Well, Canning moreso implies it, while Szreter provides pretty great documentation. I'm still so struck by how male, high-income, capitalist, and privilege-centric the demographic transition theory is. It's funny that we make the population pyramids by country, when so many country borders are political constructs drawn by people who don't live in the countries. But, we need to define the units we're analyzing, and policies are implemented at country-specific levels.
Apologies if this reads like a rant. I'm still a bit shocked that this class and Szreter's article is the first time I'm hearing substantial pushback on the theory (and I work in global health!). Canning seems to have reasonable criticisms of Dyson's work (admittedly, I haven't read Dyson) and provides helpful examples, but his criticisms read like bland footnotes. Canning makes several references to how countries in Africa don’t totally fit the model—for example on page 356 where he talks about urbanization—with only a surface-level explanation of why. Canning is providing these examples as criticisms of how the model doesn’t work for the current world, but I would have loved to have seen this explained in more depth. It feels like both Canning and Dyson are trying to retrofit explanations into frameworks that potentially shouldn’t be widely used anyway, as Szreter noted back in 1993. I’d love to see a theory of population change that is more globally representative of the real world, instead of the academically and economically dominant world, considering that about 77% of the world’s population live in Asia and Africa.
Additionally, Canning notes that reductions in fertility are (appropriately) attributed to different advancements, social norms, and contraceptives. However, I was surprised that there’s no mention of the role of increased access to education among girls and young women on fertility (at least nothing that obviously stuck out to me; perhaps some of the more general mentions cover it). Education is frequently referred to, but mostly as a motivator for lower fertility among individuals/families (“families choose to have fewer children in order to allow investments in education that will make these children better off”) than a driver of reduced fertility in populations where movements toward equal rights for girls and women have led to changes in family structure, fertility, and other norms. Additionally, a family having to invest their own resources into their children’s education is pretty representative of a capitalist society/economy, in my opinion, but perhaps he was talking about society's investment, or the “investment” in education may be more of a general sentiment (investment in time, emphasis, etc. than actual monetary investment). It's something that makes sense, but I was struck by the specific mention and verbiage of it, and the fact that there are so many people who live in late-transition societies who don't necessarily have a "choice" in what/how they invest in their children; they often are having to choose between several undesirable options.
I appreciate Canning’s discussion on the health vs wealth debate, and his use of data for this. However, it would be great if GDP per capita was not used as the only the measure of economic wellbeing. There’s no mention in the article about health, income, or wealth inequalities within populations, and no mention of other measures of societal wellbeing (perhaps 2011 was a little too early for that).