Toxic Demography: Ideology and the Politics of Population

Population politics has taken many forms throughout history. Political leaders from both democracies and non-democracies commonly place population issues at the center of their political programs, manufacturing alarm over changing demographic distributions. From fears of existential decline to debates over migration and fertility, demographic issues are often distorted by political ideologies that obscure understanding and fuel divisive narratives.

In Toxic Demography, Jennifer D. Sciubba, Michael S. Teitelbaum, and Jay Winter explore the deep entanglement of population dynamics with identity, modernization, nationalism, and populism. They unravel how concepts like ＂family＂ and ＂nation＂--often seen as straightforward--carry diverse and politicized meanings that shape demographic debates. Focusing on the United States, Europe, and Asia, the authors examine the demographic dimensions of political conflict and the societal changes driven by aging populations and low fertility rates. These regions, at the forefront of unprecedented demographic transitions, reveal how population trends have been co-opted to serve political agendas that transform population debates into battlegrounds for broader ideological struggles.

Drawing on historical and contemporary examples, Toxic Demography offers a critical lens to understand the persistent politicization of reproduction, fertility, and migration, showing how these distortions shape the futures of nations and societies.

Jennifer D. Sciubba is a leading expert on the political dimensions of population change. A former tenured professor at Rhodes College, she now works as a leader in the global nonprofit sector, advancing public understanding of demographic data and its political implications. She has published widely in academic journals and edited volumes, and is the author of 8 Billion and Counting: How Sex, Death, and Migration Shape Our World and The Future Faces of War: Population and National Security. She is affiliated with the Hess Center for New Frontiers at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and served as a demographics consultant to the US Office of the Secretary of Defense (Policy). Sciubba studied at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research in Germany and holds degrees from Agnes Scott College and the University of Maryland.

Michael S. Teitelbaum is Senior Research Associate of the Center for Labor and a Just Economy at Harvard Law School. He is a demographer, with research interests that include the causes and consequences of low fertility rates, the processes and implications of international migration, and patterns and trends in science and engineering labor markets. He is the author or editor of 10 books and several articles on these subjects. Among his previous roles, he has served as Vice President and Program Director of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, as a faculty member at Princeton University and the University of Oxford, and as Vice Chair and Acting Chair of the US Commission on Immigration Reform.

Jay Winter is the Charles J. Stille Professor of History Emeritus at Yale University. He is the author of Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: The Great War in European Cultural History and War beyond Words: Languages of Remembrance from the Great War to the Present. He is the editor of The Cambridge History of the First World War, and won an Emmy Award in 1997 as producer of The Great War and the Shaping of the 20th Century (BBC/PBS). In 2017, he received the Victor Adler Prize from the Austrian state for a lifetime’s work in history.