I decided to take a look at what sort of reception was given to the 1841 Census in England – at least as displayed in the columns of The Times.
The situation had clearly changed completely from the late C18th controversies surrounding the very idea of a census, & the protests which greeted that of 1801. The idea of numbering the people once a decade had proved its worth.
Since I used just the word ‘census’ for my keyword search I brought up several reports where 1831 Census results were still being used to bolster argument – for example over the need for more schools, for public health initiatives & in relation to elections. There was intense interest in finding out by how much the count would show the population had grown over the decade – or if it had after all been reduced by emigration.
The one area which roused some difficulty was the date; originally set for mid-year (the night of 30 June/1 July), Census day was moved forward to 6 June after it had been pointed out that the end of the month would clash with the Quarter Sessions (the Courts which heard cases too serious to be dealt with by the local Justices of the Peace), which would mean an influx of visitors to every County Town, so artificially inflating the apparent size of their populations.
The system of having enumerators – “‘intelligent persons’ residing in the area” - to deliver & collect the forms to every household & then produce the first summaries by transcribing the information, within a week, into notebooks worked well. They were paid 10 shillings for every 50 houses they dealt with (the usual number) plus 1 shilling for each 10 above that, up to a maximum of 80 households. They worked all the daylight hours on the day following the census, & some needed police escorts in ‘certain portions inhabited by the lower orders’.
By 26 July The Times was reporting some of the first results for London, with near final population counts available by the end of October.
Detailed analysis took longer of course. A geographically detailed Occupation Abstract was published in September 1844.
Confirmation of the continued fall in the numbers who derived their income solely from agriculture & the continued flow of population to the towns still left plenty of scope for political argument however in the period of intense debate about abolition of the Corn Laws, particularly the revelation that the majority were involved neither with agriculture nor cotton. There was surprise, & some puzzlement, that the population still managed to grow in size, by over 2 million since 1831, despite the drain of emigration. And marvelling at the fact that nearly 1 million women worked as household servants.
The Times leader pointed out that this analysis went someway to rectifying the great ‘want of authentic statistical information [which] is one of the greatest difficulties of the English legislator. In the absence of public documents he is driven, with more or less reluctance, to the suspicious estimates of theorists, the flagrant exaggerations of party, & the precarious guesses of absolute ignorance.’
Only some way however – there was still scope for arguing over accuracy & definitions – for example the total labour input to agriculture might be underestimated by allowing only one occupation pr person – a female servant might, after all, milk the cow.
Today of course mere information is not enough to meet the needs of the legislator who must have randomised controlled trials to resolve the flagrant exaggerations of ministers.
Link
The controversial introduction of the modern Census
Times archive
Related post
Numbering the dead
Showing posts with label population. Show all posts
Showing posts with label population. Show all posts
Friday, April 26, 2013
Wednesday, April 17, 2013
Big Victorian data
Some academic statisticians are feeling a bit worried about the future of their profession in an age of Big Data, Data Science, Data Analytics & Analysts
Big Data can mean working with billions of pieces of data - the initial challenge involves computer science rather than statistical formulae.
But is the challenge any more formidable than that which faced our statistical forebears?
In 1841 The Registrars General organised the first modern census of the population of the United Kingdom. Forms were delivered to every household to record personal details of over 25 million people. These were transcribed into notebooks by an army of local enumerators who collected & delivered the forms & helped those who could not read or write to fill them in.
I do not know if there were any kind of calculating machines available to help in the production of the rich variety of tables & analyses which were then typeset, printed & reported to Parliament. I suspect that most of the labour involved good old mental arithmetic undertaken by rooms full of Bob Cratchits. Even so, the logistical & organisational challenge must have been formidable.
A census – a complete enumeration of the population of interest – is not a sample survey whose results require the application of tests of significance & questions about how to make inferences to the population which has been measured. The challenge, before the vast modern increase in computer power & storage, was to specify which cross tabulations would be required out of the infinitely many which could be made.
In today’s world even a billion data points may be only a sample of the population of interest, which poses a new & different set of challenges.
Link
Simply Statistics: Data science only poses a threat if we don’t adapt
Significance Special Issue: Big Data
The UK 1841 Census
Related post
The first computer error
Big Data can mean working with billions of pieces of data - the initial challenge involves computer science rather than statistical formulae.
But is the challenge any more formidable than that which faced our statistical forebears?
In 1841 The Registrars General organised the first modern census of the population of the United Kingdom. Forms were delivered to every household to record personal details of over 25 million people. These were transcribed into notebooks by an army of local enumerators who collected & delivered the forms & helped those who could not read or write to fill them in.
I do not know if there were any kind of calculating machines available to help in the production of the rich variety of tables & analyses which were then typeset, printed & reported to Parliament. I suspect that most of the labour involved good old mental arithmetic undertaken by rooms full of Bob Cratchits. Even so, the logistical & organisational challenge must have been formidable.
A census – a complete enumeration of the population of interest – is not a sample survey whose results require the application of tests of significance & questions about how to make inferences to the population which has been measured. The challenge, before the vast modern increase in computer power & storage, was to specify which cross tabulations would be required out of the infinitely many which could be made.
In today’s world even a billion data points may be only a sample of the population of interest, which poses a new & different set of challenges.
Link
Simply Statistics: Data science only poses a threat if we don’t adapt
Significance Special Issue: Big Data
The UK 1841 Census
Related post
The first computer error
Thursday, July 19, 2012
60 million people ...
So we now have the first results of the 2011 Census, which show, among other things, that, the statisticians were undercounting the population by nearly half a million.
That’s a city the size of Manchester!
I haven’t seen much fuss about that, though Mark Easton led with it on his BBC blog.
To put it another way, given a population of 56.1 million, that means that the statisticians had an accuracy rate of more than 99%.
By coincidence, if my memory is correct, the same size of error was revealed by the 1971 Census. I cannot now recall what the reasons were said to be, but I think it cast further doubt on the reliability of the 10% sample census which had been taken in 1966; migration was also no doubt partly to blame, & not just from outside the UK – with no border controls, measuring the numbers moving from Scotland & Ireland was especially problematic.
It also led to calls for a full Census to be held in 1976 – obviously ten years was far too long to wait for reliable figures in a fast-changing world. Plans were made, but fell victim to Denis Healey’s cuts in public expenditure during the IMF crisis of that year.
The Times, no less, have greeted the 2011 results with a First Leader which spoke of ‘The beauty of the census’, so there is hope that this more-than-200-year-old tradition will continue in 2021 after all. The much criticised cost, of approaching £500 million, is after all less than twice the fine paid by Barclays for attempting to manipulate a different set of figures.
Some will use the Census resuls to argue that our population is too high for our over-crowded islands. I rather enjoyed checking my memory of the Ross Population Panel Report of 1973 (a UK response, in part, to the Club of Rome’s Limits to Growth) which took a relatively sanguine attitude to the prospect of a Great Britain population of 66.1 million in 2011 – only a couple of million higher than it has actually turned out to be (once you add in the figure for Scotland).
But those were ‘natural increase’ projections which made no allowance at all for future migration, which was considered far too unpredictable over such a long period of time; the experts thought that the British could grow the population to the size it is today entirely by their own efforts at procreation together with a modest increase in longevity.
In trying to find some confirmation on the web of my recollection of the 1971 Census results I came across this wonderful Public Service film, made to let the people know (in a mere 137 words) of the vital importance of the need for facts.
Links
National Archive: 1971 Census film
Explaining the Difference between the 2011 Census. Estimates and the Rolled-Forward Population Estimates
Mark Easton: England and Wales population up
Related posts
Well I never!
Who do you think you are: Francis Maude
Immigration statistics & the Eton question
GB population
That’s a city the size of Manchester!
I haven’t seen much fuss about that, though Mark Easton led with it on his BBC blog.
To put it another way, given a population of 56.1 million, that means that the statisticians had an accuracy rate of more than 99%.
By coincidence, if my memory is correct, the same size of error was revealed by the 1971 Census. I cannot now recall what the reasons were said to be, but I think it cast further doubt on the reliability of the 10% sample census which had been taken in 1966; migration was also no doubt partly to blame, & not just from outside the UK – with no border controls, measuring the numbers moving from Scotland & Ireland was especially problematic.
It also led to calls for a full Census to be held in 1976 – obviously ten years was far too long to wait for reliable figures in a fast-changing world. Plans were made, but fell victim to Denis Healey’s cuts in public expenditure during the IMF crisis of that year.
The Times, no less, have greeted the 2011 results with a First Leader which spoke of ‘The beauty of the census’, so there is hope that this more-than-200-year-old tradition will continue in 2021 after all. The much criticised cost, of approaching £500 million, is after all less than twice the fine paid by Barclays for attempting to manipulate a different set of figures.
Some will use the Census resuls to argue that our population is too high for our over-crowded islands. I rather enjoyed checking my memory of the Ross Population Panel Report of 1973 (a UK response, in part, to the Club of Rome’s Limits to Growth) which took a relatively sanguine attitude to the prospect of a Great Britain population of 66.1 million in 2011 – only a couple of million higher than it has actually turned out to be (once you add in the figure for Scotland).
But those were ‘natural increase’ projections which made no allowance at all for future migration, which was considered far too unpredictable over such a long period of time; the experts thought that the British could grow the population to the size it is today entirely by their own efforts at procreation together with a modest increase in longevity.
In trying to find some confirmation on the web of my recollection of the 1971 Census results I came across this wonderful Public Service film, made to let the people know (in a mere 137 words) of the vital importance of the need for facts.
1971 Census Film: Transcript:
Voice over: From time to time through history, the greatest need has been for facts: facts to know where to build new schools, new houses, hospitals, factories, roads. We need facts to help fight sickness and disease . and that is why on April 25 we are asking you to fill in the 1971 census. An army of men and women with light blue satchels will deliver and collect them from every household in Britain .with NO exceptions.
The form is secret. There is nothing to fear from completing it. When its contents have been analysed, it will be locked away for a hundred years under guard . and all these officials are pledged to secrecy. Identify them by the blue satchel. It's the big form with the big job to do. We need the facts . from YOU.
Links
National Archive: 1971 Census film
Explaining the Difference between the 2011 Census. Estimates and the Rolled-Forward Population Estimates
Mark Easton: England and Wales population up
Related posts
Well I never!
Who do you think you are: Francis Maude
Immigration statistics & the Eton question
GB population
Saturday, April 21, 2012
The Simpson paradox of mortality
I have just discovered a Simpson paradox in the mortality statistics for England & Wales. Well my annotations show clearly that I had noticed it at least five or six years
ago, but that was before I had learned to call it by the name of Simpson.
I am looking at a copy of a table which I think comes from Population Trends – slap on the wrist for not making a note of that. Deaths by age & sex in England & Wales for various years since 1976 & some selected quarters ending with Q2 2006. Of course I have been defeated by the ONS website in my attempts to confirm this.
The overall mortality rate for males was higher than that for females right up to 1986 (118 compared with 114 per 10,000), though it had been narrowing. By 1991 the rate was the same – 112 out of every ten thousand persons died that year. After that the all-age mortality rate was consistently lower for males than it was for females.
Against a background of falling mortality, at all ages, the rates for men have fallen more quickly than have the rates for women. So in 1996 it was 107 for men, 110 for women and, by 2005, only 93 for men but 99 for women.
And yet the mortality rates at every age remained higher for the male of the species, most notably for those aged 20 to 24 who were more than twice as likely to die as a young woman of the same age. So,as my annotations show, I needed to check how population numbers & age structures by gender had changed. I never got round to that, whether because of better things to do or another defeat by the ONS website I am unable to say.
I am looking at a copy of a table which I think comes from Population Trends – slap on the wrist for not making a note of that. Deaths by age & sex in England & Wales for various years since 1976 & some selected quarters ending with Q2 2006. Of course I have been defeated by the ONS website in my attempts to confirm this.
The overall mortality rate for males was higher than that for females right up to 1986 (118 compared with 114 per 10,000), though it had been narrowing. By 1991 the rate was the same – 112 out of every ten thousand persons died that year. After that the all-age mortality rate was consistently lower for males than it was for females.
Against a background of falling mortality, at all ages, the rates for men have fallen more quickly than have the rates for women. So in 1996 it was 107 for men, 110 for women and, by 2005, only 93 for men but 99 for women.
And yet the mortality rates at every age remained higher for the male of the species, most notably for those aged 20 to 24 who were more than twice as likely to die as a young woman of the same age. So,as my annotations show, I needed to check how population numbers & age structures by gender had changed. I never got round to that, whether because of better things to do or another defeat by the ONS website I am unable to say.
Links
Related posts
Friday, March 16, 2012
What's happened to grandma?
I have been waiting a long time for this news – thirty years (or thereabouts).
Sometime in the early 1970s what was then the Office of Population Censuses & Surveys began to include, in its new General Household Survey, questions about fertility & contraception directed at all women aged over 16, regardless of marital status. Not entirely without some trepidation – there could have been a How dare they response.
Unwanted, or at least unplanned, pregnancy was a subject of particular policy interest, not least because worries about worldwide population growth were high on the agenda.
One question asked each woman how many children, ideally, they would like to have.
The big shock came when girls born in the 1960s started to be included in the survey. As many as 25% would answer None.
Should population projections take account of this, or should the statisticians assume that they would change their minds later, when the nesting instinct kicked in.
Well now girls born in 1965 have reached the end of their (statistical) childbearing life & in December ONS issued a Statistical Bulletin to tell us what really happened. (For statistical purposes fertility is assumed to end on the day before a woman’s 46th birthday. Of course there have always been births to women beyond that date, but the numbers have always been too small for statisticians to hang around waiting to finalise the figures. Something else which may have to change.)
And 20% - one in five - of women born in 1965 have never had a child.
The ONS Bulletin compares the 1965 cohort with their mothers – for this purpose, women born in 1938, because the average age of women who gave birth in 1965 was 27. Only 10% of their mothers remained childless right up to the age of 46.
The proportion of childless women had doubled in a generation, not because of economic barriers to marriage & household formation, nor because of a shortage of men inthe population.
For me the most startling element in the bulletin however is a chart (Figure 2) which shows – for all cohorts of women born since 1920 – the percentage who reach the age of 30 without having given birth to a child.
This gives dramatic confirmation of something I felt I knew from my own experience & observation: something began to change quite radically for girls born in the years after 1945.
More than 4 out of 5 of their older sisters had had at least one child by the time they were 30, but then began a seemingly inexorably upwards trend in the number who delayed things, so that fully 45% of the 1980 cohort reached the milestone of that 30th birthday unencumbered.
I should like to see the parallel line – the one that shows the number of women who have reached the age of 60 without having had a grandchild to cuddle.
If the average generation length is 20 years then on average women become mothers at 20, grandmothers at 40 & great grandmothers at 60.
If the gap between generations widens to 25 years then the corresponding ages are: mother at 25, grandmother at 50 & great grandmother at 75.
And a generation length of 30 stretches that out to 30, 60 and 90.
So at the age when the post-menopausal grandmother starts to fulfill her evolutionary purpose of helping to bring up her daughter’s children (assuming she is not too far away either geographically or socially), her knowledge of childcare is in some ways more & more out of date & she will also be needed increasingly to help care for her own mother.
Meanwhile her daughter will have no choice but to rejoin the labour market as soon as possible to help produce the goods & services needed by all these non-working dependents in the population.
No wonder we are so concerned about how to provide affordable third party care for children & the elderly.
Sometime in the early 1970s what was then the Office of Population Censuses & Surveys began to include, in its new General Household Survey, questions about fertility & contraception directed at all women aged over 16, regardless of marital status. Not entirely without some trepidation – there could have been a How dare they response.
Unwanted, or at least unplanned, pregnancy was a subject of particular policy interest, not least because worries about worldwide population growth were high on the agenda.
One question asked each woman how many children, ideally, they would like to have.
The big shock came when girls born in the 1960s started to be included in the survey. As many as 25% would answer None.
Should population projections take account of this, or should the statisticians assume that they would change their minds later, when the nesting instinct kicked in.
Well now girls born in 1965 have reached the end of their (statistical) childbearing life & in December ONS issued a Statistical Bulletin to tell us what really happened. (For statistical purposes fertility is assumed to end on the day before a woman’s 46th birthday. Of course there have always been births to women beyond that date, but the numbers have always been too small for statisticians to hang around waiting to finalise the figures. Something else which may have to change.)
And 20% - one in five - of women born in 1965 have never had a child.
The ONS Bulletin compares the 1965 cohort with their mothers – for this purpose, women born in 1938, because the average age of women who gave birth in 1965 was 27. Only 10% of their mothers remained childless right up to the age of 46.
The proportion of childless women had doubled in a generation, not because of economic barriers to marriage & household formation, nor because of a shortage of men inthe population.
For me the most startling element in the bulletin however is a chart (Figure 2) which shows – for all cohorts of women born since 1920 – the percentage who reach the age of 30 without having given birth to a child.
This gives dramatic confirmation of something I felt I knew from my own experience & observation: something began to change quite radically for girls born in the years after 1945.
More than 4 out of 5 of their older sisters had had at least one child by the time they were 30, but then began a seemingly inexorably upwards trend in the number who delayed things, so that fully 45% of the 1980 cohort reached the milestone of that 30th birthday unencumbered.
I should like to see the parallel line – the one that shows the number of women who have reached the age of 60 without having had a grandchild to cuddle.
If the average generation length is 20 years then on average women become mothers at 20, grandmothers at 40 & great grandmothers at 60.
If the gap between generations widens to 25 years then the corresponding ages are: mother at 25, grandmother at 50 & great grandmother at 75.
And a generation length of 30 stretches that out to 30, 60 and 90.
So at the age when the post-menopausal grandmother starts to fulfill her evolutionary purpose of helping to bring up her daughter’s children (assuming she is not too far away either geographically or socially), her knowledge of childcare is in some ways more & more out of date & she will also be needed increasingly to help care for her own mother.
Meanwhile her daughter will have no choice but to rejoin the labour market as soon as possible to help produce the goods & services needed by all these non-working dependents in the population.
No wonder we are so concerned about how to provide affordable third party care for children & the elderly.
Wednesday, March 14, 2012
Problems then & now
There are, the government estimates, 120,000 ‘troubled families’ living on the edge of pauperism, crime & immorality who cost the taxpayer about £9 billion a year.
The dark underbelly of unemployment, truancy, family breakdown & poverty that threatens the rest of society, these problem families are characterised by their inability to improve their lot by their own ends, the parents often of subnormal, though not deficient, mentality & temperamental instability reflecting itself in indiscipline in the home.
Their fecklessness often results in early marriages & large families, many of whom exist in wretched conditions. Clearly, they will reproduce at an increasing rate unless the process is checked.
The underclass is where failings in education, health, welfare & crime policy meet. Parts of society are not cracked but smashed to bits.
In some quarters sterilisation has been suggested, but that is probably repugnant to the general sense of the country. Nor do these people always benefit from teaching them the ordinary methods of contraception.
Can the country afford to carry the burden of these families? On the other hand, can it afford to increase expenditure on social services? The cost of education & health is fantastic, but the existence of social problem families is a challenge to society. More nursery schools, better housing conditions, & family limitation are essential in meeting this challenge.
The prime minister must make this the defining mission of his time in power instead of leaving it to local councils to decide what to do. Something more than local action is required; better housing conditions are essential, & a big increase in the provision of nursery schools is an important long term policy.
With apologies to Rachel Sylvester, that is my mashup of her column in yesterday’s Times with a news report which was published in the same paper.
The two items are separated by almost 60 years – the first reporting an address to a conference of Educational Associations held in London in January 1953 given by Mr CG Tomlinson, recently organising secretary of the Problem Families Committee of the Eugenics Society.
A massive effort went into slum clearance & providing better housing conditions.
The pill, long-acting contraceptives, sterilisation & legal abortion have been added to the methods of ‘ordinary contraception’ which were available in 1953.
Much effort & resources have been put into affordable childcare & nursery provision.
But is the number of problem families now smaller than it was?
Today’s 120,000 families is, proportionately, not many out of a population which has grown to 27 million households, but would have presented a much larger proportion of the 16 million or so in 1953. And each family would of course have been much larger, since even with the recent flows of net inward migration the population has not grown nearly as fast as the number of households able to be accommodated in the improved stock.
The problem families have not all been magicked away, even though people don't marry young these days.
Thursday, January 19, 2012
Freemale
This is one of those Google happenstances.
I was searching for a post about the Met Office getting their forecasts wrong, using the search terms Met Office Matilda & I got a classic article from the Daily Mail – Does every Miss secretly wish she were a Mrs?
The story starts with Abigail who doesn’t have a wedding ring on the third finger of her left hand and who loves curling up on the sofa with her cat MATILDA at the end of a busy day at work. The OFFICE for National Statistics recently produced figures which show that she is far from being alone - in the past 30 years the number of unmarried women in the UK has doubled.
Psychotherapist Paula Hall is quoted as saying that she has "MET several women recently who’ve told me they won’t wear their engagement ring to work because it might give out the message that they’re only really interested in marriage and babies"
Such an provocative story to get out of boring statistics.
The title of the piece says a lot however; surely only a Daily Mail sub editor could think that we have any misses over the age of 10 these days – aren't they are all Ms’s.
Another intriguing change in the language of relationships is in the use of the word single. This no longer denotes ‘never married’ but merely what we used to call breaking up with a boyfriend. Instead of serial monogamy, these days we have serial singledom – at the age of 27 Abigail has been single for only two years.
Personally I can’t wait for the 2011 Census results to find out if The Royal Borough of Kensington & Chelsea is still the national capital for single women, or whether they have all been driven out by the massive increase in the price of property in the borough.
I was searching for a post about the Met Office getting their forecasts wrong, using the search terms Met Office Matilda & I got a classic article from the Daily Mail – Does every Miss secretly wish she were a Mrs?
The story starts with Abigail who doesn’t have a wedding ring on the third finger of her left hand and who loves curling up on the sofa with her cat MATILDA at the end of a busy day at work. The OFFICE for National Statistics recently produced figures which show that she is far from being alone - in the past 30 years the number of unmarried women in the UK has doubled.
Psychotherapist Paula Hall is quoted as saying that she has "MET several women recently who’ve told me they won’t wear their engagement ring to work because it might give out the message that they’re only really interested in marriage and babies"
Such an provocative story to get out of boring statistics.
The title of the piece says a lot however; surely only a Daily Mail sub editor could think that we have any misses over the age of 10 these days – aren't they are all Ms’s.
Another intriguing change in the language of relationships is in the use of the word single. This no longer denotes ‘never married’ but merely what we used to call breaking up with a boyfriend. Instead of serial monogamy, these days we have serial singledom – at the age of 27 Abigail has been single for only two years.
Personally I can’t wait for the 2011 Census results to find out if The Royal Borough of Kensington & Chelsea is still the national capital for single women, or whether they have all been driven out by the massive increase in the price of property in the borough.
Friday, December 30, 2011
Externalities
The truth is that 97% of the British population is squashed on to 9% of the land. Our cities are bursting, & their infrastructures are bust. They are like medieval graveyards: hundreds of bodies piles on top of each other. We must build more homes … That doesn’t mean desecrating beautiful landscapes. It does mean ignoring the nimby yelpsRichard Morrison Times 18 November 2011
The price of property is attracting lots of foreign investors just now.
Our home grown Nimbys are like the Indians who sold Manhattan for beads – they use the economic arguments about external costs to argue for their right not to lose the external benefit of their space & beautiful views.
Leaving the costs to be borne by those who must live in overcrowded conditions. Just so long as no mean little boxes spoil the area around my Georgian rectory – I might have to drive past them on my way to the motorway to get to town.
Or I might, horror of horrors – have to live near something as distasteful as a factory or industrial unit which will only destroy OUR green & pleasant land & reduce the rate at which the value of MY house keeps on rising.
Sunday, September 25, 2011
Family planning, maiden aunts & Hoovers
In an interesting article Mark Easton discusses the mystery of the Golden Cohort - British people born between the years 1925 and 1934 who have experienced unprecedented & unfollowed improvements in health & longevity.
The latest edition of Population Trends from the Office for National Statistics contains an article based on an analysis of the 1% Longitudinal Study which attempts to untangle the reasons for this but is unable to come to any very definite conclusion. The authors conclude that “there is some element of social change and experience that assisted the generations born around 1930 to show slightly greater improvements than preceding or successive generations” & suggests that future researchers may wish to look, for example, at changes in population composition.
The Thirties of course saw the so-called ‘Parents strike’, when family planning began to be respectable & more readily available & when the fall in birth rates became an increasing focus of policy concern, which in turn led to the passing of the 1938 Population Statistics Act & the appointment of the Royal Commission on Population, which finally managed to report in 1948. Eugenecists were concerned about the lack of population growth particularly among the educated classes, but on the plus side were smaller families.
The point is illustrated by my own family history. All four of my grandparents, born as the C19th moved into the C20th, came from very large families (average about 10 children), but produced only 6 of their own in total.
And how many of this golden generation were cherished only children?
Many households were still able to employ some kind of paid household help, though living-in servants were becoming a rarity; the number & type of labour saving devices was multiplying, these of course made possible by the rapid spread of household electricity – the National Grid & the Central Electricity Generating Board were both established by an Act of 1926 – which must have done much to improve the health & hygiene of these golden children.
This generation may also be the first which was born to grandparents & parents who were virtually 100% educated at least to elementary level & literate, able to have access to plenty of information in newspapers & magazines on nutrition & childcare. The then new BBC national radio service probably played its part in this.
It was also the great era of suburban expansion, providing homes with gardens & healthier environments.
Although we tend to remember the 1930s as the time of the Great Depression many people did well out of the increasing opportunities for education & office jobs with the greater availability of Grammar School scholarships. It was also just a kinder era in many ways, with the beginning of unemployment pay & welfare (despite the dreaded means test). After the conscription of WWI everybody knew that all classes/families had suffered. Now that income inequality is rising again, it would be of particular interest to look at what happened to equality as these children were growing up.
One might also wonder about the contribution to child care that was made by the army of spinsters – whether informally, as maiden aunts, or formally by growing numbers of women employed in teaching, nursing & other caring professions.
The only blip in the story of the golden generation is the bump in mortality which is attributed to the smoking epidemic, but it is worth remembering that the 1930s were marked by lower consumption of alcohol per head, which could mean that the parents of these children had more income to spare on feeding & clothing them.
The latest edition of Population Trends from the Office for National Statistics contains an article based on an analysis of the 1% Longitudinal Study which attempts to untangle the reasons for this but is unable to come to any very definite conclusion. The authors conclude that “there is some element of social change and experience that assisted the generations born around 1930 to show slightly greater improvements than preceding or successive generations” & suggests that future researchers may wish to look, for example, at changes in population composition.
The Thirties of course saw the so-called ‘Parents strike’, when family planning began to be respectable & more readily available & when the fall in birth rates became an increasing focus of policy concern, which in turn led to the passing of the 1938 Population Statistics Act & the appointment of the Royal Commission on Population, which finally managed to report in 1948. Eugenecists were concerned about the lack of population growth particularly among the educated classes, but on the plus side were smaller families.
The point is illustrated by my own family history. All four of my grandparents, born as the C19th moved into the C20th, came from very large families (average about 10 children), but produced only 6 of their own in total.
And how many of this golden generation were cherished only children?
Many households were still able to employ some kind of paid household help, though living-in servants were becoming a rarity; the number & type of labour saving devices was multiplying, these of course made possible by the rapid spread of household electricity – the National Grid & the Central Electricity Generating Board were both established by an Act of 1926 – which must have done much to improve the health & hygiene of these golden children.
This generation may also be the first which was born to grandparents & parents who were virtually 100% educated at least to elementary level & literate, able to have access to plenty of information in newspapers & magazines on nutrition & childcare. The then new BBC national radio service probably played its part in this.
It was also the great era of suburban expansion, providing homes with gardens & healthier environments.
Although we tend to remember the 1930s as the time of the Great Depression many people did well out of the increasing opportunities for education & office jobs with the greater availability of Grammar School scholarships. It was also just a kinder era in many ways, with the beginning of unemployment pay & welfare (despite the dreaded means test). After the conscription of WWI everybody knew that all classes/families had suffered. Now that income inequality is rising again, it would be of particular interest to look at what happened to equality as these children were growing up.
One might also wonder about the contribution to child care that was made by the army of spinsters – whether informally, as maiden aunts, or formally by growing numbers of women employed in teaching, nursing & other caring professions.
The only blip in the story of the golden generation is the bump in mortality which is attributed to the smoking epidemic, but it is worth remembering that the 1930s were marked by lower consumption of alcohol per head, which could mean that the parents of these children had more income to spare on feeding & clothing them.
Monday, July 25, 2011
The 27 club
Stanley Reynolds wrote a novel in the 1960s called 30 is a Dangerous Age Cynthia, based on the premiss that, in that youthful decade, if you had not made it by that age then you never would.
With the sad death of Amy Winehouse at the age of 27 comes the reminder of others whose star has burned all too briefly to that same age.
In the 1960s you were classed as EPG (elderly prima gravida) if you delayed your first pregnancy till that age. I remember that when Jean Thomson, the distinguished population statistician, suggested that fertility rates could not continue their sharp fall into the 1970s since that would mean an unprecedented & unlikely number of young women reaching the age of thirty without ever having borne a child, she came in for quite a lot of criticism on the grounds that she was insufficiently sympathetic to the liberated woman’s desire to establish herself in a career before devoting herself to motherhood.
I had a personal hypothesis that the ‘new age’ for a first birth was in fact 27, based solely on the grounds that a number of my slightly younger friends were suddenly doing just that, which seemed quite extraordinary to those of us who had somehow grown up with the idea that you needed to get on with it by the age of 24 or 25 at the latest.
We were all wrong. Twenty seven became the new seventeen, very young to have a child, & how dare you call me elderly if I have my first child at 40?
Twenty seven was also, until surprisingly recently, too old to apply for a job in the Civil Service Fast Stream (graduate trainee), not just for the mandarin, generalist, class but also for professional grades such as statistician or economist. Attempts to have this declared illegal on the grounds that it indirectly discriminated against women foundered because of the way that indirect discrimination was defined in law – a term or condition which applies equally to both sexes but with which one sex is less able to comply. An upper age limit seemed discriminatory because young women who became mothers in their early twenties would not be able to take on a full time job in the civil service, but were barred from applying after, say, their children went to school. The law looked at all those, of whatever age, with the relevant qualification & considered how many of each sex could comply with the condition that they be under 27 & found that, because women had only recently begun to go to university in significant numbers, the probability that a female graduate was under 27 was considerably higher than it was for a male.
Is there anything special about 27?
Well it is the third age that is a multiple of 9.
When you are 9 you get excited at the prospect of the first double digit birthday
At 18 you are, finally, an adult.
Let’s hope there is something other than early death which makes 27 worthy of note.
With the sad death of Amy Winehouse at the age of 27 comes the reminder of others whose star has burned all too briefly to that same age.
In the 1960s you were classed as EPG (elderly prima gravida) if you delayed your first pregnancy till that age. I remember that when Jean Thomson, the distinguished population statistician, suggested that fertility rates could not continue their sharp fall into the 1970s since that would mean an unprecedented & unlikely number of young women reaching the age of thirty without ever having borne a child, she came in for quite a lot of criticism on the grounds that she was insufficiently sympathetic to the liberated woman’s desire to establish herself in a career before devoting herself to motherhood.
I had a personal hypothesis that the ‘new age’ for a first birth was in fact 27, based solely on the grounds that a number of my slightly younger friends were suddenly doing just that, which seemed quite extraordinary to those of us who had somehow grown up with the idea that you needed to get on with it by the age of 24 or 25 at the latest.
We were all wrong. Twenty seven became the new seventeen, very young to have a child, & how dare you call me elderly if I have my first child at 40?
Twenty seven was also, until surprisingly recently, too old to apply for a job in the Civil Service Fast Stream (graduate trainee), not just for the mandarin, generalist, class but also for professional grades such as statistician or economist. Attempts to have this declared illegal on the grounds that it indirectly discriminated against women foundered because of the way that indirect discrimination was defined in law – a term or condition which applies equally to both sexes but with which one sex is less able to comply. An upper age limit seemed discriminatory because young women who became mothers in their early twenties would not be able to take on a full time job in the civil service, but were barred from applying after, say, their children went to school. The law looked at all those, of whatever age, with the relevant qualification & considered how many of each sex could comply with the condition that they be under 27 & found that, because women had only recently begun to go to university in significant numbers, the probability that a female graduate was under 27 was considerably higher than it was for a male.
Is there anything special about 27?
Well it is the third age that is a multiple of 9.
When you are 9 you get excited at the prospect of the first double digit birthday
At 18 you are, finally, an adult.
Let’s hope there is something other than early death which makes 27 worthy of note.
Wednesday, May 25, 2011
Feeding the world
It must have been the late 1970s; a large group of Chinese engineers were over in the UK on a prolonged cultural exchange/educational visit. I often saw them travelling up & down in the lift at work.
What was sad, or shocking or disturbing about this group of men, who after all must have been highly educated & from what we would have regarded as the ‘better off’ section of society, was that they all showed signs of malnutrition, most obviously in various slight skeletal malformations or sometimes downright deformity.
Well the history of famine in China constitutes a special case, but in 1960 when the population of the world was a mere 3 billion we were being taught that ‘Two thirds of the world goes to bed hungry each night’, & to be seriously concerned about the prospects for future food supplies. I particularly remember the scientists who promised the development of one small pill which could provide all we need, & talk about denatured protein (don’t ask).
Instead we humans went on to experience an astonishing increase in longevity.
It was the poor chicken what got it.
Or at least so I was thinking as I read one section of David Edgerton’s The shock of the old: technology and global history since 1900.
In 1960 there were some 4 billion chickens in the world.
By 2000 there were 13 billion.
And they have become nearly twice as heavy on only half as much feed as they used to need. They should exercise more!
The results are predictable – they live much shorter lives, killed at half the age they used to be.
The number killed for meat per year rose from 6 billion to 45 billion.
The question for those who would rather chickens were better treated remains – how would you have fed the people?
What was sad, or shocking or disturbing about this group of men, who after all must have been highly educated & from what we would have regarded as the ‘better off’ section of society, was that they all showed signs of malnutrition, most obviously in various slight skeletal malformations or sometimes downright deformity.
Well the history of famine in China constitutes a special case, but in 1960 when the population of the world was a mere 3 billion we were being taught that ‘Two thirds of the world goes to bed hungry each night’, & to be seriously concerned about the prospects for future food supplies. I particularly remember the scientists who promised the development of one small pill which could provide all we need, & talk about denatured protein (don’t ask).
Instead we humans went on to experience an astonishing increase in longevity.
It was the poor chicken what got it.
Or at least so I was thinking as I read one section of David Edgerton’s The shock of the old: technology and global history since 1900.
In 1960 there were some 4 billion chickens in the world.
By 2000 there were 13 billion.
And they have become nearly twice as heavy on only half as much feed as they used to need. They should exercise more!
The results are predictable – they live much shorter lives, killed at half the age they used to be.
The number killed for meat per year rose from 6 billion to 45 billion.
The question for those who would rather chickens were better treated remains – how would you have fed the people?
Saturday, April 09, 2011
Girls & boys
The radio was playing quietly in the background late one evening this week, I was listening with only half an ear at best, when I was suddenly grabbed by what sounded like an old Pathé newsreel. It said something like:
This in the same week that the newspapers were reporting that the latest census results show a further deterioration in the Indian sex ratio.
These days selective abortion is blamed, but I first became aware of this phenomenon back around the mid-1970s, when looking at a UN digest of results of the 1970/1 round of censuses, which showed that India & China were the only two (of the reporting countries) with a population consisting of more men than women.
I discovered the sex ratio, which the demographic textbooks put at a natural 105 boy babies born for every 100 girls, in the early 1970s; although this fluctuated, across time & space, it was said rarely to go outside the range 102 – 108. Higher mortality in males means that at some point females start to outnumber males, by a factor of 2 or more by the time you get to the highest age groups. In this country at that time there were more than three times as many women as there were men aged over 75, so the overall result is that typically the population of all ages in a country splits about 52 women to 48 men.
Selective abortion was not an option in those days, since there was no easily available, reliable method of determining the sex of a foetus. Was infanticide still widespread?
One contemporary study I found (just in Madras, if memory serves) said not, except possibly in a few isolated rural areas. The explanation lay in the fact that poor families just took less care of girls, in the sense that they got to eat only after their brothers had fed from the best the family could offer. And, if they were ill, the family would not pay for expert medical attention, scrape together the money to take them to a hospital – perhaps involving a trip of many miles & several days’ absence from working in the fields for at least one parent. The village healer was the best it got for a girl.
We express outrage at the modern attitude to the value of a girl, but just look at how recently the English could openly express such sentiments. Princess Margaret was born in 1930.
We even, in the 1980s, breathed a sigh of relief that Princess Diana managed to get all that out of the way by producing an heir & a spare in almost the shortest possible time.
Before the birth the whole country was praying for a boy. But now we are over our disappointment & everybody loves Princess Margaret Rose
This in the same week that the newspapers were reporting that the latest census results show a further deterioration in the Indian sex ratio.
These days selective abortion is blamed, but I first became aware of this phenomenon back around the mid-1970s, when looking at a UN digest of results of the 1970/1 round of censuses, which showed that India & China were the only two (of the reporting countries) with a population consisting of more men than women.
I discovered the sex ratio, which the demographic textbooks put at a natural 105 boy babies born for every 100 girls, in the early 1970s; although this fluctuated, across time & space, it was said rarely to go outside the range 102 – 108. Higher mortality in males means that at some point females start to outnumber males, by a factor of 2 or more by the time you get to the highest age groups. In this country at that time there were more than three times as many women as there were men aged over 75, so the overall result is that typically the population of all ages in a country splits about 52 women to 48 men.
Selective abortion was not an option in those days, since there was no easily available, reliable method of determining the sex of a foetus. Was infanticide still widespread?
One contemporary study I found (just in Madras, if memory serves) said not, except possibly in a few isolated rural areas. The explanation lay in the fact that poor families just took less care of girls, in the sense that they got to eat only after their brothers had fed from the best the family could offer. And, if they were ill, the family would not pay for expert medical attention, scrape together the money to take them to a hospital – perhaps involving a trip of many miles & several days’ absence from working in the fields for at least one parent. The village healer was the best it got for a girl.
We express outrage at the modern attitude to the value of a girl, but just look at how recently the English could openly express such sentiments. Princess Margaret was born in 1930.
We even, in the 1980s, breathed a sigh of relief that Princess Diana managed to get all that out of the way by producing an heir & a spare in almost the shortest possible time.
Saturday, April 02, 2011
Tesco labour mobility
An odd story which I heard on BBC radio the other weekend – I haven’t checked any details – told us that Tesco have been recruiting managers from Czechoslovakia because they are unable, despite their best efforts, to fill posts in new stores with local applicants.
The reason for giving a reaction without checking the details is that it occurred to me that this may represent a problem of labour mobility which is caused by the difficulties in the housing market, rather than by a complete lack of qualified British candidates. These complications could have made families, in particular, unwilling to take the risk of moving to a new job in another part of the country, especially if they expect to have to move again for further career progress. If they have a house which they can afford, in an area where the schools are good, they may fear, particularly if that first move is away from the South East, that they would not be able to afford to move back because of differential rises in house prices or the risk of mortgage famine. Instead people would prefer to settle for a longer commute, which limits their search area for new jobs.
There has been little interest in the patterns & problems of internal migration since the 70s. Certainly little coverage in the media or regular press releases from ONS though there has been some interest recently in reaction to the BBC relocation to Salford.
The movement of population from the north & from the other constituent countries of the UK used to be a constant focus of political concern. Initiatives such as the Hardman dispersals of the civil service, & limits on office building in London were taken. But in the 1980s recession the victims just stayed & decayed in the old industrial areas.
There are not, now, the same opportunities for a man, maybe a father, to migrate to the south east on his own, leaving the family at home, while he finds a high-wage job in the booming south. There is not the low-cost accommodation in hostels, B&Bs, bedsits or lodgings in private houses that used to make this a possibility, nothing that would allow him to send back home enough to pay the mortgage. Even if he does, like many young Poles did , share a high-rental property, living at high density with similar migrants, the amount of money he could save to send home to the family each week would not go far enough in Manchester in the same way that it would in an eastern European country.
On the other hand, there may just be a real shortage of people in the age group normally recruited to such posts, because of the low birth rates of the 1970s.
The reason for giving a reaction without checking the details is that it occurred to me that this may represent a problem of labour mobility which is caused by the difficulties in the housing market, rather than by a complete lack of qualified British candidates. These complications could have made families, in particular, unwilling to take the risk of moving to a new job in another part of the country, especially if they expect to have to move again for further career progress. If they have a house which they can afford, in an area where the schools are good, they may fear, particularly if that first move is away from the South East, that they would not be able to afford to move back because of differential rises in house prices or the risk of mortgage famine. Instead people would prefer to settle for a longer commute, which limits their search area for new jobs.
There has been little interest in the patterns & problems of internal migration since the 70s. Certainly little coverage in the media or regular press releases from ONS though there has been some interest recently in reaction to the BBC relocation to Salford.
The movement of population from the north & from the other constituent countries of the UK used to be a constant focus of political concern. Initiatives such as the Hardman dispersals of the civil service, & limits on office building in London were taken. But in the 1980s recession the victims just stayed & decayed in the old industrial areas.
There are not, now, the same opportunities for a man, maybe a father, to migrate to the south east on his own, leaving the family at home, while he finds a high-wage job in the booming south. There is not the low-cost accommodation in hostels, B&Bs, bedsits or lodgings in private houses that used to make this a possibility, nothing that would allow him to send back home enough to pay the mortgage. Even if he does, like many young Poles did , share a high-rental property, living at high density with similar migrants, the amount of money he could save to send home to the family each week would not go far enough in Manchester in the same way that it would in an eastern European country.
On the other hand, there may just be a real shortage of people in the age group normally recruited to such posts, because of the low birth rates of the 1970s.
Thursday, March 31, 2011
Census
There is quite a mood of pessimism around about the likelihood of a good response to the Census, which cannot be helped by the formidable-looking form which many must find daunting.
Then there is the clearly recognised problem of whether it is even possible to attempt to number the people on a single day in a modern society where nobody ever stands still, not just geographically but socially & in their personal relationships – a problem which may have contributed to the alleged undercounting of the population of New York in last year’s US census.
I have not been terribly impressed by the official poster campaign – fill in your Census form & help plan local services – that’s a policy or political argument for prioritising the expenditure. You don’t need statistics to make decisions about how to spend (or cut) money on services – I could make them right here, right now - & you would have a hard time proving that decisions based on Census statistics are better than my kind. Does anyone really believe that any mistakes made in the late 1970s were caused by the late cancellation of the 1976 census?
It strikes me that one reason why a recent survey found that a large percentage of the population does not even realise that a census is necessary to count how many people live in this country is that they no longer know the story of ‘the first census’, the one that took Joseph & Mary to Bethlehem. As children the link was made explicit for us, so that the modern census linked us to the birth of Jesus.
But then perhaps it’s just as well that today’s children don’t know the King James’s version: And it came to pass in those days, that there went out a decree from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be taxed*.
In retrospect it might have been better to present the Census as a real Big Society project, rather than an expensive way of collecting data that companies like Experian (a credit reference agency) supposedly already have.
The census is a collaborative effort to paint a statistical picture, a snapshot, of how we live now. In return for our cooperation we get a guarantee of 100 years of confidentiality for our individual personal details, which will then however be released to give those who come after us invaluable information about their forebears, the history of the house they live in, their neighbourhood, & even the domestic details of the lives of our celebrities.
Our census this year was done & dusted on line. It was a pleasant experience – ONS have shown that they can produce a really clear & well designed web site when they put their minds to it.
The only drawback was that I couldn’t get away with not answering the ethnic question, no box for ‘declined to answer’, so I had to use my ingenuity.
The wording of the question is interesting: Tick one box to best describe your ethnic group or background. Best in what sense? To whom or for what purpose, or in whose opinion? Can’t remember the wording last time but it is certainly different from 1991, which asked for the respondent’s own opinion. That of course is unsatisfactory, if we are hoping to get an insight into the extent of disadvantage, since discrimination depends on the observer’s assessment of ethnicity – which may be inaccurate, even bizarre.
The overall balance of the questions as usual reflects the political preoccupations of the last few years – we will have a comprehensive picture of ‘identity’ – if the response is good enough. Race, nationality, language, partnership status.
For me the most interesting change is the attempt to get at the detailed relationships within the household, recording the link of each person to all the others, instead of just to Person 1. So statisticians should not have to scratch their heads (which are wrapped in wet towels) about problems such as:
Person 1: Mr Smith, 50
Person2: Mrs Smith, 47, his wife
Person 3: Miss Smith, 18, his daughter
Person 4: Master Smith, 2, his grandson
Is Miss Smith the mother of Master Smith?
But how sad to read the detailed instructions in the nortes about how to count children who divide their time between homes.
*PS Word’s grammar checker suggests an amendment to the King James’s version. It would prefer that the entire world should be taxed.
Then there is the clearly recognised problem of whether it is even possible to attempt to number the people on a single day in a modern society where nobody ever stands still, not just geographically but socially & in their personal relationships – a problem which may have contributed to the alleged undercounting of the population of New York in last year’s US census.
I have not been terribly impressed by the official poster campaign – fill in your Census form & help plan local services – that’s a policy or political argument for prioritising the expenditure. You don’t need statistics to make decisions about how to spend (or cut) money on services – I could make them right here, right now - & you would have a hard time proving that decisions based on Census statistics are better than my kind. Does anyone really believe that any mistakes made in the late 1970s were caused by the late cancellation of the 1976 census?
It strikes me that one reason why a recent survey found that a large percentage of the population does not even realise that a census is necessary to count how many people live in this country is that they no longer know the story of ‘the first census’, the one that took Joseph & Mary to Bethlehem. As children the link was made explicit for us, so that the modern census linked us to the birth of Jesus.
But then perhaps it’s just as well that today’s children don’t know the King James’s version: And it came to pass in those days, that there went out a decree from Caesar Augustus that all the world should be taxed*.
In retrospect it might have been better to present the Census as a real Big Society project, rather than an expensive way of collecting data that companies like Experian (a credit reference agency) supposedly already have.
The census is a collaborative effort to paint a statistical picture, a snapshot, of how we live now. In return for our cooperation we get a guarantee of 100 years of confidentiality for our individual personal details, which will then however be released to give those who come after us invaluable information about their forebears, the history of the house they live in, their neighbourhood, & even the domestic details of the lives of our celebrities.
Our census this year was done & dusted on line. It was a pleasant experience – ONS have shown that they can produce a really clear & well designed web site when they put their minds to it.
The only drawback was that I couldn’t get away with not answering the ethnic question, no box for ‘declined to answer’, so I had to use my ingenuity.
The wording of the question is interesting: Tick one box to best describe your ethnic group or background. Best in what sense? To whom or for what purpose, or in whose opinion? Can’t remember the wording last time but it is certainly different from 1991, which asked for the respondent’s own opinion. That of course is unsatisfactory, if we are hoping to get an insight into the extent of disadvantage, since discrimination depends on the observer’s assessment of ethnicity – which may be inaccurate, even bizarre.
The overall balance of the questions as usual reflects the political preoccupations of the last few years – we will have a comprehensive picture of ‘identity’ – if the response is good enough. Race, nationality, language, partnership status.
For me the most interesting change is the attempt to get at the detailed relationships within the household, recording the link of each person to all the others, instead of just to Person 1. So statisticians should not have to scratch their heads (which are wrapped in wet towels) about problems such as:
Person 1: Mr Smith, 50
Person2: Mrs Smith, 47, his wife
Person 3: Miss Smith, 18, his daughter
Person 4: Master Smith, 2, his grandson
Is Miss Smith the mother of Master Smith?
But how sad to read the detailed instructions in the nortes about how to count children who divide their time between homes.
*PS Word’s grammar checker suggests an amendment to the King James’s version. It would prefer that the entire world should be taxed.
Link
The Census Surprise in New York
Related post
Well I never!
The Census Surprise in New York
Related post
Well I never!
Friday, October 08, 2010
Family allowance
This week we have had a fine demonstration of how the middling classes will cling to their welfare payments every bit as tenaciously as the workshy & the scroungers & the ASBO bearing classes.
Because it is just not fair that some (small?) number of families where the mother stays home to look after the children while father goes off to a job will, under the Chancellor's proposed changes to Child Benefit, ‘lose out’ to the couple next door who both go out to work, albeit at jobs which are less well paid.
Of course the complainers wish to see this anomaly rectified without any complicated forms to fill in or any government department prying into their personal living arrangements. And they certainly do not wish to see any return to the system of taxing the combined incomes of husband & wife as if they were one.
I have had a lifetime of feeling that these child benefits are JUST NOT FAIR but I have learned to put up with it.
For it was a very childish feeling, born out of the fact that from their beginning, as Family Allowances, in 1945 & for the next thirty years, they were paid only for the second & any subsequent children in a family.
Was this just to keep costs down, or was it a deliberately pro-natalist policy at a time when the slow growth of the British population, as typified by the parent’s strike of the 1930s, was a focus of policy concern, as would be demonstrated by the Report of the Royal Commission on Population of 1948?
Whatever the reason the first born got nothing – or so it seemed to me, despite my mother’s reassurance that it was for all of us.
I just knew that it was just another way in which little sisters got all the indulgence & big sisters got all the blame.
Because it is just not fair that some (small?) number of families where the mother stays home to look after the children while father goes off to a job will, under the Chancellor's proposed changes to Child Benefit, ‘lose out’ to the couple next door who both go out to work, albeit at jobs which are less well paid.
Of course the complainers wish to see this anomaly rectified without any complicated forms to fill in or any government department prying into their personal living arrangements. And they certainly do not wish to see any return to the system of taxing the combined incomes of husband & wife as if they were one.
I have had a lifetime of feeling that these child benefits are JUST NOT FAIR but I have learned to put up with it.
For it was a very childish feeling, born out of the fact that from their beginning, as Family Allowances, in 1945 & for the next thirty years, they were paid only for the second & any subsequent children in a family.
Was this just to keep costs down, or was it a deliberately pro-natalist policy at a time when the slow growth of the British population, as typified by the parent’s strike of the 1930s, was a focus of policy concern, as would be demonstrated by the Report of the Royal Commission on Population of 1948?
Whatever the reason the first born got nothing – or so it seemed to me, despite my mother’s reassurance that it was for all of us.
I just knew that it was just another way in which little sisters got all the indulgence & big sisters got all the blame.
Related posts
Sisterly love
Sisterly love
Friday, September 24, 2010
Safety in childbirth
A recent edition of More or Less on Radio 4 attempted to answer a young listener’s question: What would be the population of the world today if WWI - with its carnage of young men – had never happened.
Imponderable, to say the least. But Professor Jay Winter attempted some elucidation.
For me, the most startling revelation was that infant mortality declined sharply – largely because, with so many doctors on war service many more births were attended by a midwife only.
The use of forceps fell dramatically - & perhaps midwifes were more scrupulous about washing their hands.
Imponderable, to say the least. But Professor Jay Winter attempted some elucidation.
For me, the most startling revelation was that infant mortality declined sharply – largely because, with so many doctors on war service many more births were attended by a midwife only.
The use of forceps fell dramatically - & perhaps midwifes were more scrupulous about washing their hands.
Related post
Wednesday, July 14, 2010
Who do you think you are: Francis Maude
On Saturday morning BBC news reported, very uncritically & seemingly as fact, that next year’s census will be the last complete enumeration of the UK population.
The origin of this news item appears to be an interview with Francis Maude in the Daily Telegraph. Mr Maude believes that records held by the Post Office, local government and credit checking agencies would be more effective sources of the data.
Well, methodology is always under discussion & no doubt the UK Statistics Authority will respond in due course, taking account the views of all those outside government who make good use of census data.
I do not want to enter into the statistical arguments here, except to point out once again that the census is not just of the people but of housing; at a time when housing discontent is rising up the political agenda it will not hurt to remind the Conservative party of the need for reliable information on which to base policy – remember 1951.
Census data is very expensive to collect, but it is hard to think of any other output of the UK statistical system which has such enduring value.
If I were looking to see where the real political backlash to Mr Maude’s proposals might come from I would look not to statisticians but to family historians. Even today thousands of people are regularly accessing, online or otherwise, the results of Censuses from as long ago as 1841, though not of course any more recent than 1911 because the personal details are kept private for one hundred years.
All those people who are using this invaluable data to help answer the question of who they are might be very upset at the idea that their descendants will not be able to carry on with the compilation of the family history, that they themselves may well just disappear from the records.
The origin of this news item appears to be an interview with Francis Maude in the Daily Telegraph. Mr Maude believes that records held by the Post Office, local government and credit checking agencies would be more effective sources of the data.
Well, methodology is always under discussion & no doubt the UK Statistics Authority will respond in due course, taking account the views of all those outside government who make good use of census data.
I do not want to enter into the statistical arguments here, except to point out once again that the census is not just of the people but of housing; at a time when housing discontent is rising up the political agenda it will not hurt to remind the Conservative party of the need for reliable information on which to base policy – remember 1951.
Census data is very expensive to collect, but it is hard to think of any other output of the UK statistical system which has such enduring value.
If I were looking to see where the real political backlash to Mr Maude’s proposals might come from I would look not to statisticians but to family historians. Even today thousands of people are regularly accessing, online or otherwise, the results of Censuses from as long ago as 1841, though not of course any more recent than 1911 because the personal details are kept private for one hundred years.
All those people who are using this invaluable data to help answer the question of who they are might be very upset at the idea that their descendants will not be able to carry on with the compilation of the family history, that they themselves may well just disappear from the records.
Related posts
Saturday, July 03, 2010
Baby BMI
I was startled to hear on the radio someone report the birth of a baby weighing over 8lbs – on the 82nd percentile. That means something like 1 baby in every 5 these days is more than 8lbs?
In my youth everybody knew that a normal full term baby weighed in at 7 lbs. One of the less attractive attributes of my mother & her friends – indeed of all the other women in the town - was the eager way in which they awaited the birth of a newly wed's first child – usually, or at least often, within a year of the wedding. Then the ‘Well, they say it’s a honeymoon baby, but it’s barely 8 months & it weighed 7 lbs!’
News of an eight pound baby made everybody’s eyes water.
I had noticed that babies born to readers of The Times – at least those whose birth is announced in the expanded version of the column which now comes complete with photo of the new arrival & too much information (what the mother was doing when her waters broke, for heavens sake) – often weigh in at closer to 9 lbs, but these are the most affluent & well nourished section of the population. The mothers are also much older, taller & heavier than those of my mother’s generation.
I found figures for 2005 in Table 5 of Birthweight and gestational age by ethnic group.
Looking just at the category White British (the sort that my mother's generation would have been thinking of) I was slightly relieved to see that the average for a full term baby is still under 7 ½ lbs, but still almost one baby in eight weighs in at a wince-inducing 8.8lbs.
We are used to hearing that low birthweight is a Bad Thing, but does anybody even try to calculate the BMI for a baby & make pronouncements as to what is the healthy number? Is there any evidence that White British babies are getting longer as well as heavier? Are the heaviest babies born to the tallest women? Does obesity start in the womb? I think we should be told.
In my youth everybody knew that a normal full term baby weighed in at 7 lbs. One of the less attractive attributes of my mother & her friends – indeed of all the other women in the town - was the eager way in which they awaited the birth of a newly wed's first child – usually, or at least often, within a year of the wedding. Then the ‘Well, they say it’s a honeymoon baby, but it’s barely 8 months & it weighed 7 lbs!’
News of an eight pound baby made everybody’s eyes water.
I had noticed that babies born to readers of The Times – at least those whose birth is announced in the expanded version of the column which now comes complete with photo of the new arrival & too much information (what the mother was doing when her waters broke, for heavens sake) – often weigh in at closer to 9 lbs, but these are the most affluent & well nourished section of the population. The mothers are also much older, taller & heavier than those of my mother’s generation.
I found figures for 2005 in Table 5 of Birthweight and gestational age by ethnic group.
Looking just at the category White British (the sort that my mother's generation would have been thinking of) I was slightly relieved to see that the average for a full term baby is still under 7 ½ lbs, but still almost one baby in eight weighs in at a wince-inducing 8.8lbs.
We are used to hearing that low birthweight is a Bad Thing, but does anybody even try to calculate the BMI for a baby & make pronouncements as to what is the healthy number? Is there any evidence that White British babies are getting longer as well as heavier? Are the heaviest babies born to the tallest women? Does obesity start in the womb? I think we should be told.
Friday, April 09, 2010
The first millennium: population & global warming
Looking again at the estimates of world population since 40,000 BCE (which were included in a paper given by Roger Thatcher to the British Association in 1984 & taken from an essay by Biraben which I have not been able to read) I was very struck by the figures for the first modern millennium.
They show a world population of 255 million in 1 AD which was not to be surpassed for nearly 1,000 years; in fact by 400 AD the population is estimated to have fallen to 206 million & just stayed at that figure for the next 200 years.
This coincides of course with the end of the Roman Empire, & a pretty much Europe-wide collapse in the infrastructure of towns – a fact which was noted in the recent In Our Time 2-part special on The City.
It is also of relevance to the climate change debate, the (in)famous hockey stick graph & the so-called Medieval Warm Period (AD 800 to 1400). I do not know how or if the IPCC took account of historical population change & movement, & I am not in a mood to find out at the moment.
But there is a recent post on Gravity & Levity, The global temperature is inherently unstable, which looks interesting; I have printed of a copy to read since it is not the kind of thing I can take in properly from a screen. But I should like to quote here the authors apology for not joining the debate sooner:
“It has been such an emotionally- and morally-charged debate during the past few years that only very rarely is a fact presented without an accompanying censure or call to arms. This creates a particularly bad environment for the advancement of scientific debate, where dissenters are immediately shouted down because of a strong political/social pressure to reach consensus (not that I can’t see why; there is much more urgency to global warming than to most scientific riddles). The problem is that the fundamental mechanism through which scientific ideas advance is disagreement. If scientists aren’t allowed to argue with each other, then they arrive at the truth much more slowly.”
Those are points which other non-denying sceptics have been making recently, but none with such eloquent heartfelt simplicity
They show a world population of 255 million in 1 AD which was not to be surpassed for nearly 1,000 years; in fact by 400 AD the population is estimated to have fallen to 206 million & just stayed at that figure for the next 200 years.
This coincides of course with the end of the Roman Empire, & a pretty much Europe-wide collapse in the infrastructure of towns – a fact which was noted in the recent In Our Time 2-part special on The City.
It is also of relevance to the climate change debate, the (in)famous hockey stick graph & the so-called Medieval Warm Period (AD 800 to 1400). I do not know how or if the IPCC took account of historical population change & movement, & I am not in a mood to find out at the moment.
But there is a recent post on Gravity & Levity, The global temperature is inherently unstable, which looks interesting; I have printed of a copy to read since it is not the kind of thing I can take in properly from a screen. But I should like to quote here the authors apology for not joining the debate sooner:
“It has been such an emotionally- and morally-charged debate during the past few years that only very rarely is a fact presented without an accompanying censure or call to arms. This creates a particularly bad environment for the advancement of scientific debate, where dissenters are immediately shouted down because of a strong political/social pressure to reach consensus (not that I can’t see why; there is much more urgency to global warming than to most scientific riddles). The problem is that the fundamental mechanism through which scientific ideas advance is disagreement. If scientists aren’t allowed to argue with each other, then they arrive at the truth much more slowly.”
Those are points which other non-denying sceptics have been making recently, but none with such eloquent heartfelt simplicity
Thursday, April 01, 2010
For how long do we have the right to life?
I have just come across another contribution to this topic, thanks to the Economix blog.
Carl Haub of the Population Reference Bureau presents estimates which suggest that about 5.8 percent of all people ever born are alive today. I have been looking to see how these compare with those which Roger Thatcher presented to the British Association for the Advancement of Science in 1984. There are differences, but we are basically in the same ballpark.
What has been especially intriguing however has been the comparison between the Haub approach, which looks at birth rates, & the Thatcher approach which concentrates on mortality. Of course a great deal of speculating is needed for both.
We are told that birth rates (per 1000 population of all ages) have fallen steadily & consistently since the birth of agriculture around 8000 BC, and at 23 per 1000 are now less than a third of what they were then. Mortality rates on the other hand appear to have remained at a constant level of 35 (per 1000 population of all ages) for most of the last 2 millennia, almost up to the beginning of the C20th. Since then they have fallen precipitately, so that they are now less than a quarter of the level of 8000 BC. And still, we are told, falling rapidly – longevity is increasing at a rate of about 5 hours per day.
At the start of the C20th the population of the world still numbered less than 2 billion. It has now passed 6 billion. But these figures make it more startlingly clear that it is not the birth rate which is responsible. Have we any right to tell others to stop reproducing, just so we can live longer & consume the world’s resources for ourselves? Or to take a greater share of the productive capacity of the young to provide for the kind of care & support we need when elderly, infirm or demented?
What will be the effect on human evolution of limiting reproduction to a simple two-will-do replication of each mating pair?
The age structure of population varies between countries, so even with constant fertility rates, the birth rates will be higher in those countries which have higher proportions of young people today. We will need population movement to balance out these imbalances, to provide the care we need.
Carl Haub of the Population Reference Bureau presents estimates which suggest that about 5.8 percent of all people ever born are alive today. I have been looking to see how these compare with those which Roger Thatcher presented to the British Association for the Advancement of Science in 1984. There are differences, but we are basically in the same ballpark.
What has been especially intriguing however has been the comparison between the Haub approach, which looks at birth rates, & the Thatcher approach which concentrates on mortality. Of course a great deal of speculating is needed for both.
We are told that birth rates (per 1000 population of all ages) have fallen steadily & consistently since the birth of agriculture around 8000 BC, and at 23 per 1000 are now less than a third of what they were then. Mortality rates on the other hand appear to have remained at a constant level of 35 (per 1000 population of all ages) for most of the last 2 millennia, almost up to the beginning of the C20th. Since then they have fallen precipitately, so that they are now less than a quarter of the level of 8000 BC. And still, we are told, falling rapidly – longevity is increasing at a rate of about 5 hours per day.
At the start of the C20th the population of the world still numbered less than 2 billion. It has now passed 6 billion. But these figures make it more startlingly clear that it is not the birth rate which is responsible. Have we any right to tell others to stop reproducing, just so we can live longer & consume the world’s resources for ourselves? Or to take a greater share of the productive capacity of the young to provide for the kind of care & support we need when elderly, infirm or demented?
What will be the effect on human evolution of limiting reproduction to a simple two-will-do replication of each mating pair?
The age structure of population varies between countries, so even with constant fertility rates, the birth rates will be higher in those countries which have higher proportions of young people today. We will need population movement to balance out these imbalances, to provide the care we need.
Another intriguing question which has ocurred to me: although it is not true that the living outnumber the dead, is it possible that the total years of life of those people now living exceeds the total number of human life years of the past?
And there can, after all, be no evolution without death.
And there can, after all, be no evolution without death.
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