Statistical Studies of Historical Social Structure PDF
Preview Statistical Studies of Historical Social Structure
POPULATION AND SOCIAL STRUCTURE Advances in Historical Demography Under the Editorship of E. A. HAMMEL Department of Anthropology University of California, Berkeley Kenneth W. Wächter with Eugene A. Hammel and Peter Laslett, Statis tical Studies of Historical Social Structure In preparation Nancy Howell, Demography of the Dobe !Kung Statistical Studies of Historical Social Structure Kenneth W. Wächter Department of Statistics Harvard University Cambridge, Massachusetts With Eugene A. Hammel Peter Laslett Department of Anthropology Trinity College University of California, Berkeley Cambridge, England Berkeley, California With the participation of Robert Laslett and Hervé LeBras Academic Press New York San Francisco London A Subsidiary of Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Publishers COPYRIGHT © 1978, BY ACADEMIC PRESS, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. NO PART OF THIS PUBLICATION MAY BE REPRODUCED OR TRANSMITTED IN ANY FORM OR BY ANY MEANS, ELECTRONIC OR MECHANICAL, INCLUDING PHOTOCOPY, RECORDING, OR ANY INFORMATION STORAGE AND RETRIEVAL SYSTEM, WITHOUT PERMISSION IN WRITING FROM THE PUBLISHER. ACADEMIC PRESS, INC. 111 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York 10003 United Kingdom Edition published by ACADEMIC PRESS, INC. (LONDON) LTD. 24/28 Oval Road, London NW1 7DX Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Wächter, Kenneth W Statistical studies of historical social structure. (Population and social structure: Advances in historical demography) Bibliography: p. 1. Family—England—History. 2. Households—England— History. 3. England—Population—History. 4. Demography —Data processing. I. Hammel, Eugene A., joint author. II. Laslett, Peter, joint author. III. Title. HQ613.W3 301.42ΊΌ942 78-51232 ISBN 0-12-729150-4 PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA List of Exhibits 2.1 Average demographic rates realized in SOCSIM simulation batches 18 2.2 Marriage and parity statistics realized in the simulation batches 19 2.3 Stem and leaf diagrams from randomly selected batches 22 3.1 Household classifications 40 4.1 Mean percentages of types of households in simulation batches 44 4.2 Proportions of household principles falling into different classes 45 4.3 Proportions of household principles: Different household formation rules for same demographic rates 47 4.4 Proportions of household principles: Effect of different growth rates under the same mortality and household rules 48 4.5 Proportions of household principles: Effect of differing ages at marriage under the same mortality and household formation rules 49 4.6 Triangle plot: Batch averages of proportions of stem, nuclear, and other household types 51 4.7 Triangle plot closeup of prinionuptial and primoreal batch means 52 4.8 Proportions of households of nuclear type in batches R4 and P4 54 4.9 Quartiles and standard deviations of household proportions 55 4.10 Triangle scatterplot for batch R3 56 4.1 1 Empirical distribution of interpoint distances on triangle plot for batch R3 57 4.12 Triangle scatterplot for batches P2 and U1 59 4.1 3 Triangle scatterplot for English household samples 61 5.1 English main sample of 30 settlements 70- 7 1 5.2 English reserve sample of 34 settlements 72-73 ix x LIST OF EXHIBITS 5.3 Summary statistics of household proportions in English samples 74 6.1 Continental sample, 15 settlements 92 6.2 Comparative household proportions 100 7.1 Cumulative creations and extinctions of baronetcies by historical year 124 7.2 Logarithms of numbers surviving: Branching theory predictions and baronetcies data 128 7.3 Logarithms of numbers surviving: Special branching theory predictions and baronetcies data 129 7.4 Logarithms of numbers of baronetcies surviving at least x years from their creation 132 8.1 Means and standard deviations for Hilandar list 141 8.2 Means by village and occupation for Hilandar 142 8.3 Correlations between variables in Hilandar list 144 8.4 Results of multiple regression 147 9.1 Predictions of numbers of distinct ancestors 159 10.1 Proportion of children of each age without parents 167 10.2 Density of parental deaths by age of child 168 10.3 Proportion of grandparents deceased by age of grandchild 169 10.4 Density of all grandparental deaths by age of grandchild 170 10.5 Proportion of grandchildren with at most N grandparents 171 10.6 Frequency of each configuration for present-day France 173 10.7 Proportion of great-grandchildren with at most N living great-grandparents 174 10.8 Proportion at each age of inheritors by modes 1 and 2 176 10.9 Proportions at each age with 0, 1, or 2 living parents, for 1750s France 178 10.10 Proportions at each age with 0, 1, 2, or 3 or 4 living grandparents, for 1750s France 179 10.11 Frequency of each configuration for 1750s France 180 10.12 Proportions at each age with 0, 1, or 2 living parents, for Venezuela 181 10.13 Distribution by age of the four parental configurations in the female stable age pyramid for 1970s France 183 10.14 Distribution by age of the four parental configurations in the female stable age pyramid for Venezuela 184 10.15 Distribution by age of the four parental configurations in the female stable age pyramid for 1750s France 185 11.1 Observed age pyramid for Ealing, 1599 191 11.2 Theoretical mean age pyramid for North Two model 191 11.3 Ealing female age pyramid corrected for clumping and smoothed 196 11.4 Log variances versus log means for age pyramid cells 207 11.5 Correlations between sizes of age groups in Labor Day simulations 210 11.6 Standard deviations observed in simulations and predicted by Rule of Thumb 213 11.7 Quartiles of sizes of age groups over time in Labor Day simulations 215 Foreword Statistics makes exacting demands on the imagination. How can I shape my speculations, the user of statistical approaches is required to ask, so that evidence is capable of bearing on them? From each interpre tation, what is it which follows which can be tested and brought within established theoretical knowledge? You have to figure that out for your self—a revealing American phrase, this—which can be a peremptory, sobering task. For a full third of the contents of this book, in those chapters which deal with microsimulation, the reader is wholly caught up in an invented, an imaginary statisticians' world, entirely created by them in collusion with computers and those who tell computers what to do. It might seem at first sight that nothing could be further removed from the intellectual arena occupied by the student of society, whether anthropologist, psy chologist, sociologist, or, more particularly, historian. This book, histo rians might be disposed to think, is not a book for them. On the contrary. It is the working historian whose possible indifference to a work with our title we are most anxious to overcome. There is surely a sense in which the activity of all historians is to some extent an activity of simulation. They are perpetually simulating to them selves past situations, past processes; the plans, intentions, and proceed- xi xii FOREWORD ings which might or must have taken place in the minds of men and women now long dead. The interesting thing is that, as they reflect on what happened and try to make up their minds why it happened and what it meant then, what it means now, historians and other students of society are more often engaged in simulating to themselves what could have been the case, but was not, than in simulating what they finally decide must have been the case. Historians simulate occurrences in fact in order to dispose of them. They do so to discover what would have happened if the simulated succession of events had also taken place. If it turns out that these other eventualities never transpired, they conclude that the events they have conjured up as possibilities, and the choices and attitudes which went with them, could not have ever been realities. This is the mood in which we have mounted our simulation experiments about household composi tion. Historians, I think, usually carry through such reasoning intuitively and descriptively. They are here being offered an overt, principled, arithmetically exact exposition of their ordinary intellectual procedures. We have done our simulation in public and we now offer the outcomes for everyone to inspect. Household composition as a subject of course is exemplary: Though important in itself, at least to us, we have all simula- ble processes in our purview. I am aware, of course, that to dispose of what could not have happened is not to decide what must have happened. All the intricate issues as to counterfactuals are raised by an argument of this kind. My own position, set out in 1968,l is that no historical judgment can be passed unless counterfactuals are taken into account, that is, unless we try to judge what would have happened if what did happen had not happened. Sys tematic treatment of hypotheticals is the vocation of statistics, par excel lence. It is one thing, however, for us to be presented with a technically formulated and statistically argued comparison between what might have happened and what did happen and another thing to understand the details sharply enough to make this comparison our own. To this I can only respond in a personal way by insisting on the advantage of my own opacity. In the lengthy interchange between Profes sor Wächter and myself, the principle has always been that no point should be allowed to pass until I understood it. We hoped in this way to insure that every literary reader of our text would understand it too. A similar principle of interchange used to inform the addresses which took place in what are sometimes called the heroic days of cultural broadcasting, in Britain in the 1940s and 1950s, the heyday of the Third 'Laslett (1968) "History and the Social Sciences," in Sills, ed., Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences. FOREWORD xiii Programme. It gave rise, for example, to the explicatory prose of such books as Fred Hoyle, now Sir Fred Hoyle, on the Nature of the Universe, in 1949. It would be wrong to pretend that we have succeeded in following this principle throughout the whole of this volume. There are parts of the argument about variances in age pyramids in Chapter 11 and even about baronetcies in Chapter 7 which I do not always understand. All of those who, like myself, stand in the anteroom so to speak of mathematical and statistical knowledge will recognize the sense of comprehension which means that you understand it on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, but do not on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays. However, the few im placably technical steps in the arguments have been confined to sections of their own, leaving the main portions of the text as accessible as possible. Having done our best for that part of our wished-for readership which is entirely historical and literary in its background and outlook, it is to be hoped that the mathematically and technically informed will not feel that they have been the losers. For these statistical studies of historical social structure are addressed in all sincerity to the whole society of those for whom the problems of social understanding are important, in the past or in the present. Peter Laslett Hall of Graduate Studies Yale University Preface Tyche, Goddess of Chance, is the patron of this book. First, because the book grew out of a purely happenstance encounter, and, second, because its principal theme is the need and opportunity, in studying historical social structure, for giving chance its due. The researches reported here are the fruits of collaboration between an historical sociologist, a social anthropologist, and a mathematical statisti cian. Careful planning would scarcely have brought the three of us, Peter Laslett, Gene Hammel, and myself, together. But accident arranged for us to be in the same room in Bishop's Hostel at Trinity College, Cam bridge, on a sunny Tuesday afternoon in June of 1971. We were all expressing curiosity—casual enough on my part—about the households in which people used to live. Like many people, I was a vague believer in a once upon a time when households had been large, hierarchical, full of kin with diverse roles and relationships, and with a niche for everyone. I should have cited Buddenbrooks or A Child's Christmas in Wales as survivals of families as they used to be, before industrialization brought nuclear family households to the fore. That there were reasons for doubt ing this picture came as news to me. Household and Family in Past Time, which Peter Laslett coedited, was in preparation when we chanced to meet in Bishop's Hostel. It described XV xvi PREFACE listings of members of households in preindustrial settlements in which coresident kin were rare. That was surprising to anyone with the picture I then held, and since 1971 it has become a matter for general surprise and controversy. But what, if anything, did these data prove? Could not the relative absence of kin be plausibly explained as an artifact of demo graphic rates? Household and Family in Past Time left the question in the air. Gene Hammel, with experience in computer simulation, was arguing that a computer should be used to model the impact of demography on household composition. Each of us for different reasons found that proposal intriguing, and our work together began. The problem which tempted us into collaboration was the problem of demographic constraints on English preindustrial household kin compo sition. The originality in our approach was to be the substitution of computer simulation technology for guesswork. We intended a short sequel to Household and Family in Past Time. But our research gradually taught us that the problem was wider and the computer technology secondary. Building models was easy, but making models interlock with historical data tightly enough for inferences to remain tenable in the face of random effects proved delicate. Our different backgrounds made us leery of different evasions, and the great merit of the computer turned out to lie in forcing us to make our assumptions explicit. We came to regard the household composition problem as an initiation into working out new ways to take seriously and view systematically the uncertainties of historical data. What was called for was a contribution to the statistical conceptualization of historical issues. Our computer simulation experiments, then, established a legacy of interpretive concerns, concerns which tie the household problem to other problems. Maneuvers devised for household data have been elabo rated and refined for other sorts of data, partly collaboratively and partly individually, but with continual interchange among us. This background explains the structure of the book. The first six chapters form a connected report of our findings on household composition and demographic influ ences. The other five chapters take the methodological preoccupations developed during the household study and carry them over into studies of five other problems in historical social structure. The unity is a unity of approach. Of the six chapters on household composition, the first four are de voted single-mindedly to the computer simulation experiments. Chapter 5 presents new data on English household composition and analyzes it in the light of the simulation outcomes. Chapter 6 broadens the discussion to the European Continent and ends with general reflections on stem- family hypotheses. The last five chapters branch out into other subjects.
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