2.2: Mortality: Geographic and Socioeconomic Comparisons

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En provenance du cours de The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology

Understanding China, 1700-2000: A Data Analytic Approach, Part 2

21 notes

The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology

Understanding China, 1700-2000: A Data Analytic Approach, Part 2

21 notes

The purpose of this course is to summarize new directions in Chinese history and social science produced by the creation and analysis of big historical datasets based on newly opened Chinese archival holdings, and to organize this knowledge in a framework that encourages learning about China in comparative perspective. Our course demonstrates how a new scholarship of discovery is redefining what is singular about modern China and modern Chinese history. Current understandings of human history and social theory are based largely on Western experience or on non-Western experience seen through a Western lens. This course offers alternative perspectives derived from Chinese experience over the last three centuries. We present specific case studies of this new scholarship of discovery divided into two stand-alone parts, which means that students can take any part without prior or subsequent attendance of the other part. Part 1 (https://www.coursera.org/learn/understanding-china-history-part-1) focuses on comparative inequality and opportunity and addresses two related questions ‘Who rises to the top?’ and ‘Who gets what?’. Part 2 (this course) turns to an arguably even more important question ‘Who are we?’ as seen through the framework of comparative population behavior - mortality, marriage, and reproduction – and their interaction with economic conditions and human values. We do so because mortality and reproduction are fundamental and universal, because they differ historically just as radically between China and the West as patterns of inequality and opportunity, and because these differences demonstrate the mutability of human behavior and values. Course Overview video: https://youtu.be/dzUPRyJ4ETk

À partir de la leçon

Orientation and Module 1: Who Are We and Who Survives

Before you start with the content for Module 1, please review the Assignments and Grading page and introduce yourself to other learners who will be studying this course with you.

1.1 Who Are We? An Introduction4:29

1.2: Big Data and the Scholarship of Discovery10:00

1.3: Big Data, New Facts and Classic Social Theory7:16

1.4: New Data and Eurasian Comparisons6:47

2.1: Who Survives: Life Under Pressure8:17

2.2: Mortality: Geographic and Socioeconomic Comparisons5:49

2.3: Mortality and Who We Are4:33

Rencontrer les enseignants

James Z. Lee
Dean and Chair Professor of the School of Humanities and Social Sciences

[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]

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