[MUSIC] Welcome to understanding China, 1700 to 2000. A data analytic approach, part two section six. Mortality, Geographic and Socioeconomic comparisons. Ironically, what you can see from this chart here, which gives you the aggregate probability of dying for different age groups. 0 to 1, 1 to 15, 15 to 25, 25 to 55, 55 to 75 for populations from Belgium, Sweden, Italy, Japan and China. What you see is that in spite of such prevalence, female infanticide in China, and also to some extent in Japan, the mortality of older children and adults in historical China was very similar to other historical populations at the aggregate level. However, if we look at the individual level, we can discover that the patterns are actually far more complex. Life under Pressure: Mortality and Living Standards in Europe and Asia, 1700-1900, the first volume in the EAP MIT Press Series, pioneers this new approach to the comparative analysis of societies in the past applying similar analytic models to big historical datasets of different, in some cases very different, human societies to produce comparable coefficients of human behavior across Eurasia. We examine individual life histories, recorded an almost one and a half million observations to analyzing the visual mortality response. So short term social and economic pressure in Western Europe and East Asia. In other words we examine the Malthusian model which assumes that these population responses to exogenous economic pressure were largely uniform and drove economic development. Instead we show in Life under Pressure that there were many differences in mortality levels and mortality responsiveness by socioeconomic status, and that these were the products both of passive actions in accordance with existing customs and institutions as well as active agency of individuals. And we explain why differences in mortality responsiveness by household composition and relationships reflect these active decisions by parents and families about resource allocation and work. Our calculations of the responsiveness of mortality to the short-term economics of stress suggests that the Malthusian assumption that the positive check was more predominant in China than in Europe is incorrect. In fact, the greatest reaction to short-term economic stress in the MIT Eurasian Population and Family History Study were the lower social economic status populations in the EAP European communities, in particular the landless. In southern Sweden, in Scania for instance, a decrease in real wage after 1815 by slightly more than a half, would increase the responsiveness and mortality among the landless by 79%, but produced no statistically significant effect on the landed. In Northeastern China and Northeastern Japan, by contrast, mortality simply did not respond to similar increases in grain prices. Instead because of the prevalence of infanticide, there was a strong association between reproduction and socioeconomic circumstances. But less between mortality and socioeconomic circumstances. Even when patterns of mortality levels and responses by age and gender, in other words, were broadly similar, there were patterns of differentials between and within households that are varied tremendously from one context to another. And in contrast to the received wisdom that the Asian joint family system for example will be more protective of individuals than the European stem or nuclear family systems. The Eurasia project discovered that in the Eurasian communities at least, the situation was far more complex. Such that despite the relative insensitivity to changes in grain prices among Asian families, children who lost a parent, orphans or semi-orphans, were, in fact, more vulnerable in complex Asian families than they were in simpler Western families. Mortality responses to bad times, in other words, were the end product of a complex equation of age, gender, socioeconomic status on the one hand, family community preferences and resources on the other. And there was no one universal pattern of mortality responses a la Malthus by age, sex, or even socioeconomic status. Generally, the East was characterized by less sensitivity to mortality, by more consistent preferences, and weak socioeconomic selectivity. While the Western populations were characterized by greater responsiveness, more complex preferences, greater socioeconomic differentials and preferential as well as discriminatory behavior. [MUSIC]