September 10, 2004
Farm to Factory and a billion Russians?
First off, I should probably clarify something. As far as I can tell, Allen is a contrarian, not an apologist. For instance, he calculates that without the increased mortality and reduced fertility caused by Soviet collectivization -- he uses the word 'terrorist' to describe it -- the Soviet population would have been 27 million people larger in 1989. Not exactly a ringing endorsement for Stalin. But Allen has something of AJP Taylor's willingness to tweak the nose of conventional wisdom, I think.
Regarding the billion Russians: what Allen noticed was that Russian and Soviet raw birth rates matched Indian ones (barring the years of war, revolution, and collectivization, when drops were followed by rebounds) until the 1940s, when Soviet birth rates dropped and stayed down. Someone once quipped that the Soviet Union was just Upper Volta with rockets. Well, it did have Third World birth rates for a very long time.
Allen took heroic amounts of old Russian and Soviet demographic data and analyzed them to determine what factors might be responsible for this drop. His results ended up being numerically rather similar to a fertility model T. Paul Schultz came up with after analyzing Third World fertility in the 1970s and 1980s, which is pretty neat, so I'll discuss it here.
Schultz's model is a simple (mostly) linear equation that relates a country's fertility rate, the average number of children born per woman, to its demographics. For instance, for every additional year of education the average woman has, that country's fertility rate is computed to drop by half a point. For every ten percent of a country's population that lives in cities, the fertility rate is computed to drop by a tenth of a point. For every ten percent of a country's population that still works on a farm, the fertility rate is computed to rise by two-tenths of a point. And so on.
It's pretty good as these things go, and Allen found that it tracked Soviet fertility very well (again, barring the years of war, revolution, and collectivization).
So Allen used Schultz's equation to break down the factors of Soviet fertility decline. Between 1928, the break-even year for the Soviet Union compared to prewar Tsarist Russia, and 1960, Soviet fertility declined by 3.41 children per woman, from 6.47 to 3.07 (rounding). Allen found that 1.62 of this drop could be explained by education, 1.00 by better diet, and 0.67 by the Soviet Union's economic transformation into a more urban society, the remaining 0.12 due to a decline in religion.
Thus Allen concludes:
If the USSR had not followed this path -- if, for instance, industrialization and urbanization had proceeded less rapidly and if schooling had been expanded slowly and provided to men in preference to women -- then population growth would have been explosive. At the end of the twentieth century, the population would have approached one billion as in India, where urbanization has been limited and where most women remain illiterate.
Since I know at least one reader will be interested, let me give you Schultz's fertility model as Allen gives it.
Schultz's model predicts that the fertility rate will be close to:
5.79
+ -0.551 * (the average number of years of female education)
+ 0.179 * (the average number of years of male education)
+ 0.517 * log10(the GDP per adult)
+ -0.0084 * (percent urban)
+ 0.019 * (percent labor force in agriculture)
+ 0.0115 * (percent Catholic)
+ 0.0239 * (percent Protestant)
+ 0.0119 * (percent Muslim)
+ -0.0035 * (calories per day)
+ 0.00000053 * (calories per day) ^ 2
Damn, that's ugly.
Allen leaves out year-specific dummy variables and a statistically insignificant variable for family planning. Also, I have corrected what I believe to have been a numeric typo in the final coefficient; in the book it was 0.00053, which gives nonsensical results. Notice that increased wealth and male education increase the fertility rate. And yes, only those three religions are given; apparently both godless heathens and Orthodox Christians have little effect on fertility (though I suspect that Schultz's sample only had one Orthodox nation on its list, namely Ethiopia).
Thanks for the details.
Posted by: Gareth Wilson at September 10, 2004 06:27 AMInteresting that he's got smaller coefficients for Muslim and Catholic than for Protestant. Not what I would have predicted.
I wonder about the sample set, though. "Third-World" in the 70s and 80s? My first thought is that there might be era and geography-specific effects skewing the results.
Posted by: Bernard Guerrero at September 10, 2004 11:10 PMSecond thought: Did Schultz account for selection bias or "reject inference" in any way? That is, might not certain factors that affect a state's fertility also directly affect the liklihood of finding that state in his sample from the Third-World?
I'm recalling some sloppy work that I found when I started at my current employer that essentially ended up giving people additional points for having previously declared bankruptcy. :^)
Third Thought: A poor, over-populated Russia would actually solve one slight difficulty I've been having with my AH project, as I figure it would tend to bring on greater pressure in Central Asia and more conflict with the Brits.
Posted by: Bernard Guerrero at September 10, 2004 11:56 PMHi Bernard,
Schultz specifically investigated the recent fertility decline in low-income countries. So that kind of means the Third World by default. It's selection, but not selection bias.
In my opinion, it would be extremely hard to write a plausible alternate history where women's education in the Russian lands did not continue to advance -- especially in the scenario you've written so far, with its prominent role for certain French bluestockings -- and that seems to have been the major factor in the Soviet fertility drop in our history.
Also, if I'm not mistaken, in your scenario, isn't Europe under the Continental system? That will expand Russian grain exports earlier, while keeping it closed off from North American supplies. This would accelerate commercial agriculture in Russia, which would end up having the opposite demographic effect.
(If you want some fun, have that Virginian McCormick bring the designs for his reaper to the court of the Tsar.)
This would create a more urban, and probably more industrial Russia earlier (though not necessarily richer), which would have interesting effects on imperialism in central Asia. A Tsarist Russia that could actually manage the logistics to Kabul? And instead of peasant conscripts, slum dwellers.
C.
Posted by: Carlos at September 11, 2004 12:35 AM