As one looks back on the important developments in political science over the past two decades, there is much to be applauded. While it may be premature to say that we have come “of age” as a scientific discipline, the field is clearly in better shape today than it was in the early 1950s. One indicator is the ratio between mere speculation and observed empirical regularities reported in our journal articles. Another is the decline in the percentage (if not in absolute numbers) of our colleagues who insist that political phenomena are just not amenable to scientific examination. A third might be the dramatic increase in the number of political scientists who have been exposed to training in the techniques and rationale of data making and data analysis. The list could be extended, but we need not do so here.

On the other hand, a stance of comfortable complacency would be very premature. Not only have we fared badly in coming to grips with the knowledge-action relationship in the abstract, but we have by and large done a poor job of shaping the policies of our respective national, provincial, and local governments. Since others as well as myself have dealt—if not definitively—with these issues before, let me eschew further discussion of the knowledge application question for the moment, and go on to matters of basic research. Of the more serious flaws to date, two stand out particularly. One is the lack of balance between a concern for cumulativeness on the one hand and the need for innovation on the other. My impression is that students of national politics (at least those who work in the vineyard of empirical regularities) have been more than conscientious in staying with one set of problems, such as the relationship between political attitudes and voting behavior. But students of inter-national politics have, conversely, tended to move all too quickly from one problem to another, long before cumulative evidence has been generated and before our findings are integrated into coherent wholes.

The current interest in fertility decline and the demographic transition has led to extensive study of the secular decline of fertility in countries and sub-regions of presently low fertility. Extensive work has been completed or is underway regarding Europe in connection with Ansley Coale’s European Fertility Project. In addition, considerable attention has been paid to fertility in the demographic experience of the United States, and to other areas which have experienced fertility decline. One problem with most historical fertility studies is that they lack data on age-specific fertility and also on fertility differentials. So, for example, the European Fertility Project has relied on a form of indirect standardization, the indices of overall fertility (If), marital fertility (Ig), illegitimate fertility (Ih), and proportions married (Im), to compensate for the lack of age-specific data. There are similar historical data constraints on some types of differential fertility categorizations (e.g., social class, literacy, occupation, nativity).

Contemporary Denver is a metropolis shaped in the automobile age. When the Denver Planning Commission first warned about the “sinister disease” of decentralization in 1941 and reported “startling evidences of the flight of Denver residents across the corporate boundaries,” 72.4 percent of the population of the five-county Denver area lived within the city itself (Table 1). Thirty-five years later, metropolitan area population had more than tripled, but suburban growth had cut Denver’s share of the total to 35.8 percent. The suburban counties of Adams, Arapahoe, Boulder and Jefferson accounted for one third of all Coloradans, and local residents ranked surburban sprawl as one of three major problems of the metropolitan area.

Economic history, as a combination of two disciplines, has had a rather curious evolution. This is indicated both by looking at its checkered academic development in the United States, and by contrasting its evolution in the United States with that in England and elsewhere. Whereas in England and most European countries economic history is regarded as a separate discipline, with its own departments and professors, such an academic separation does not exist in the United States. Here, reflecting the dual nature of the subject, economic historians can be found in either history departments or in economics departments, and the nature of academic specialization often means they teach two distinct student bodies, with infrequent communication across disciplinary lines. Separatist tendencies have seemed more pronounced in the past two decades, when there was a marked change in the study of economic history in the United States, a change that has also affected other sub disciplines of history: quantification and model-building have spread into many areas of historical study. But in some measure this movement in economics reflects the recent tendency for economic historians to come from economics, rather than from history departments. Since the causes of the change seem, in part, peculiar to the United States, what I say about recent tendencies in the field may not fully reflect developments in other countries, although there seem to be similar trends emerging, albeit with some lags, in England and elsewhere in Europe.

By now it is received doctrine of long standing that the economies of northwestern Europe were repeatedly held in check by diminishing returns in the Middle Ages. Much of this argument has been focused on the course of economic affairs in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. This period is commonly pictured as the most dramatic example of the normal tendency for population growth to place increasingly severe pressure on the resource base. The evidence most frequently offered to support this thesis for the fourteenth century is the substantial decline in population to which the Black Death is believed to be a dramatic, but by no means exclusive, contributor. This is not to say that it has been generally believed that no growth occurred in the Middle Ages. On the contrary, many proponents of this view stress that there were lengthy subperiods within the era in which both per capita income and population increased. It is held that ultimately such gains were reversed and pushed back to the level of subsistence, however. The dominant force is seen to be diminishing returns à la Malthus in that population always continued to increase until eventually—intermittent growth notwithstanding—it spread the available nonhuman resources so thinly across the population that further increase in its size was impossible. Probably the best known spokesman for this thesis is Professor M. M. Postan. He has spent a good part of his distinguished career constructing the conceptual model and assembling the historical evidence to substantiate the hypothesis. The essentials of his position are supported by the other widely recognized commentators on the question-Georges Duby, N. J. G. Pounds, Sylvia L. Thrupp, J. Z. Titow, and B. H. Slicher Van Bath. Recently the view has been given a modern, formal specification in the works of Douglass C. North and Robert P. Thomas and that of Ronald Lee. In recent years some of the components of this explanation have been challenged by scholars such as Barbara Harvey, John Hatcher, Mavis Mate, N. J. Mayhew, and D. G. Watts. The traditional view seems to have survived such doubts, however, as is apparent in the tendency of scholars to continue to couch their investigations of economic affairs in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries in that framework. The issue is certainly important enough, however, that a comprehensive reexamination of it is warranted.