Table Of ContentPOPULATION 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
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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.
