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The Hofstee Lecture 1998
Reproduction and survival in an unknown world:
what drives today’s industrial populations, and to what future?
D.A. Coleman, Reader in Demography, University of Oxford
Department of applied social studies and social research
1 | Introduction
The Low countries, for so long the cockpit of Europe thanks to the great wealth created there by their ingenious
inhabitants, are now the focus of a different kind of turmoil; one of ideas born of the rich soil of Dutch
demography. We must thank Dutch-speaking demographers for bringing to a world too long intimidated by
microeconomics the notion that ideas, as well as money, drive demographic change. Here the second demographic
transition was not only invented as an idea but has been enthusiastically put into practice by millions
of people. At the front of this work is the NIDI, known internationally as one of the most distinguished demographic
institutions in the world, the founder of which was the late eponymous hero of this lecture. I feel
very honoured to have been invited to give this Hofstee Lecture for 1998.
2 | What is the ‘unknown world’?
The ‘unknown world’ of the title of this lecture is tomorrow’s population of the industrial and post-industrial
countries. In these countries, in the richest environment of demographic data that the world has ever seen,
our explanations of the mechanisms of demographic behaviour, and hence our ability to predict its future, remain
poverty-stricken. In this new demographic terra incognita, we can see what is happening but we do not
know why and we cannot tell what will happen next. This lecture is, for the most part, a confession of ignorance
– as to what form the future will take, why people in some countries chose to have more children than
others, why enlightened people ever choose to have any children at all. I will speak mostly about children;
therefore about the first demographic transition and the second demographic steady-state which may follow
it. The lecture is not primarily about the ‘second demographic transition’, which is mostly about sex. I do not
blame demographers for being more interested in sex than in children. But children are more important. And
the fact that the two can be so completely separated is both the great achievement of the 20th century and also
one of our biggest problems.
In a recent learned essay, Dirk van de Kaa (Van de Kaa, 1997) put European demographic trends firmly into
the broader context of European post-modernist intellectual thought, placing the importance of value shift in
demographic change which he, (Van de Kaa, 1987), Lesthaeghe and others (Lesthaeghe and Meekers, 1986)
have done so much to inspire, onto an even broader intellectual and cultural canvas. I take off my hat to this
remarkable intellectual tour de force. But can I suggest that what matters is not so much ‘post-modern’, a no-