[MUSIC] Welcome to Understanding China, 1700-2000, A Data Analytic Approach. Part Two, Section Three: Big Data, New Facts, and Classic Social Theory. Virtually all population theory, can be traced back to Thomas Robert Malthus and his contemporaries, Adam Smith, David Ricardo, whose work together forms the formal basis for our understanding of the modern world, and what we now call, modernization. In his famous An Essay on the Principle of Population, Malthus sought to explain why Western Europe, especially England, had achieved higher living standards than the rest of the world, especially China. And according to Malthus, demographic responses to hard times played a key role in balancing population and resources. A marriage-based preventive check in Northwest Europe allowed it to sustain higher living standards than the rest of the world where a mortality-based positive check predominated. And this model of Malthusian processes determining the overall process of development and of modernization has been tremendously influential, even in the late 20th century, where there has been a widespread neo-malthusian revival. Both in the terms of the study of England and also for the study of China. In England, again based on big data, the Cambridge Group for the Study of Population and Social Structure, led by Tony Wrigley, the president of the British Academy, and a number of other distinguished scholars, especially from Cambridge University and the London School of Economics. Relaunched the neo-malthusian revival, which then was adopted by, especially scholars at Stanford, and the Netherlands, who in a series of books called Life at the Extremes, meaning the extreme ends of Eurasia, proceeded to claim that the population processes that they can observe were very much the same as those that had been propounded by Thomas Robert Malthous at the end of the 18th century. Now in contrast, over the last 20 some years, there's been what's called the California school of Chinese and comparative World History, of which perhaps the most influential book overall has been Ken Pomeranz's The Great Divergence. And for population studies, for population behavior, my book with Wang Feng, One Quarter of Humanity: Malthusian Mythology and Chinese Realities. Followed by another series of studies contrasting Eurasian populations, Eurasian population of family history project which has three major books, published by the MIT press Eurasian population and family history series, which we'll discuss in the weeks ahead. Now in the Malthusian model the idea of modernity is based on the binary opposition of past and present, where the modern west, the present, is contrasted with the historical west which was non-modern. And the contrast of rest and west, that is of western Europe and the rest of the world. And the assumptions were that the past, the rest, were largely collective whereas the present, the west, were largely individualistic. And the past and the rest were characterized by largely passive human behavior, whereas, the present and the west were characterized by human agency that is, by proactive human decisions about human actions. Ansley Coale has called the calculus of conscious choice, where human beings make decisions about their population behavior and act accordingly. The Malthusian understanding of Chinese population, high mortality, early and universal marriage, high fertility is contrasted with the data-driven discoveries about Chinese population. Which are summarized in one corner of humanity by Wang Feng and myself, which introduces a demographic system of collective intervention with not high mortality, but moderate mortality, but high rates of female infanticide. Not only in universal marriage for all, but early universal marriage for females contrasting with low rates and late marriage for males. Not high fertility, but low moderate marital fertility supplemented by high rates of male and sometimes female adoption. These discoveries have been further amplified by other data discoveries from various European historical populations summarized in the third volume, second and third volume of the MIT Eurasian and population of families through project. Which shows that deliberate sexuality fertility control occurred long before 19th century modernity, and that deliberate spacing of births was practiced, not only in the East, but also in the West. Contrary to the assumption that only modern populations exercised control over their reproduction, recent demographic comparison of populations in historical Europe and Asia demonstrate the importance of human agency throughout the world in understanding pre-modern individual population behavior. [MUSIC]