ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book shows how some demographic expansions in the past may have been conducive to net positive, rather than negative, effects on food supply capacities to accommodate rising numbers. It considers the nature and likelihood of a next generation of increasingly effective birth control methods. Technological innovations responsive to rising demographic needs may, for extended periods, offset diminishing returns tendencies even in long-settled areas of high agrarian density and rapid rates of population growth. The book argues that technological and associated socioeconomic potentials for increasing upper-age life chances could be vast indeed among DC populations. It focuses on technological factors most directly related to agriculture, education, prospective new contraceptive methods, and demographic linkages to emerging death and disease control technologies. Technological change and its linkage with population-development interrelations continues to be a stepchild of demographic research.
