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Israel, in her 25 years of existence, received an unprecedented volume of immigration, which was the major source of her high population growth. This immigration was heavily concentrated in the first five years, 1948–1952; mass immigration of 711,000 supplemented an initial population of 630,000. Subsequently, since 1952, a very peculiar age-sex structure has developed: namely, instead of a pyramid, a wide rectangle for the younger age groups “topped” with a narrow pyramid for the older age groups. The peculiar age-sex dynamics is analyzed in relation to the volume of immigration with its uneven time distribution, the age selectivity of migrants and fertility-mortality patterns of migrants. It is concluded that the uneven time distribution of immigration and the higher fertility of migrants are jointly responsible for the development of Israel’s peculiar age dynamics, and that the absence of either of these two factors alone would eliminate it. The peculiar dynamics has societal implications in the short and the long run, some of which are discussed.

became of the women of the Silent Generation, those coeds of the fifties who took lecture notes while knitting argyle socks for their boyfriendsand never dropped a stitch? Where are they now, the mothers of the baby boom, the settlers of the suburbs? What did they do when their bubble burst in the mid-sixties, when Betty Friedan told them what they'd already sensed: successful husbands, well-decorated "splits," and high-achieving children do not a full life make? Some simply denounced Friedan and went back to their kitchens, taking up needlepoint to soothe their ruffles. Others found jobs or discovered ways to work some vocational partnership with their husbandsfulfilling a dream cherished among those housewives yet so secret even Friedan failed to detect it. Still others, like me, took Friedan's all-American, all-purpose curemore education. Now, along with approximately 410,000 other adult women, I am enrolled in an institution of higher education. It isn't possible to know whether I am part of a trend: until 1972 the Bureau of the Census didn't count those over 34 attending college. Perhaps the bureau's directors shared the bias of the chief secretary of the sociology department where I am registered, a woman heard to remark that enrollees over that age belong in another sort of institution. That worthy, no spring chicken herself, once opened

W E ARE LIVING in an age of crisis. This is a pure platitude, because men have always lived in an age of crisis. Since before the Sphinx began posing its riddles, men have faced the future with foreboding and anxiety. This is a time of change, but change is the definition of time. So I like to remember that the Chinese character for crisis is a double symbol: danger and opportunity. I have chosen for my theme "Problems and Opportunities" because I want to be very realistic in discussing with you the problems and dangers I see ahead for foreign language teaching; at the same time I believe there are solutions to the problems, and opportunities contained in them for greater success and service. The first problem I see is that of decreasing enrollments in our language classes. There are several reasons for this. School populations will not increase as rapidly as in the past decade. The "baby boom" of the forties and fifties has now passed. The census and demographic studies seem to show that our school population will grow, but much more slowly (perhaps 2 percent yearly). More important for us specifically is that language requirements are being dropped, quite generally. Colleges and universities dropped them in the thirties, reinstated them in the fifties and early sixties, largely due to the campaign of the MLA Foreign Language Program and to the Sputnik furor; and now are again dropping the requirements both for the degree and for admission to college. The natural result is that High Schools and Prep Schools are makng foreign languages only recommended for the college bound, and optional or even "counter-indicated" for the terminal student. One thing is certain: we are no longer a "protected" profession with a captive clientele guaranteed to us by college requirements and other bases of an academic "status quo." Underlying this significant change is the permissiveness evident in our entire life and society today. Everthing is becoming optional-morals, drugs, social ethics, financial responsibility, family obligations. Small wonder that permissiveness in our academic curriculum is the vogue of the moment. Students are told that they know best what subjects they should study in order to become well educated, and that their choice may

This paper focuses on a study which examined the employment of older workers by small retailers in the United States. It considers the literature on the future role of senior employees in the economy, the merits of hiring these individuals, their needs, and steps which can be undertaken to improve their motivation and make them more productive. Further, it sets forth the results of an empirical investigation into the senior citizen employment practices of small retailers, advantages and disadvantages of employing seniors, and expected future employment trends. The manuscript concludes with a discussion of the implications of these patterns for small retailers. Introduction The past several decades have witnessed an aging of the United States population, as those in the baby boom generation and their progeny move on into maturity. This trend continues, as the median age of the country advances rapidly and steadily with the passage of time (Moyers & Dale, 2004). Improvements in nutritional practices, exercise patterns, and medical care have resulted in larger numbers of individuals who reach age 65 and beyond. In turn, many of these experience mental and physical health status that is superior to that of previous generations. Further, large numbers of seniors evidence a preference for expanding their working years beyond age sixty-five, either on a full-time or a part-time basis (Dychtwald, Erickson, & Morison, 2004). Some small retailers are confronted with difficulty in recruiting, hiring and retaining capable employees and have vacant positions in both the skilled and unskilled ranks (Kraut, 2005). This pattern is perhaps most evident in regions of the country experiencing substantial economic growth, such as portions of the Southwest and Southeast. Various means of acquiring additional sought employees are available, but one that appears to possess considerable potential is to hire and retain older workers. For some small retailers, this may be the superior alternative (Peterson & Spiker, 2005). Objectives of the Study The study which this manuscript addresses focused on several objectives: 1. To provide insights on the degree to which small retailers in the United States employ older workers. 2. To uncover advantages of employing older workers, in the opinion of small retailers. 3. To uncover problems associated with employing older workers, in the opinion of small retailers. 4. To assess expected future hiring and retention intentions for older workers among small retailers. Review of the Literature The literature contains various articles which consider recruiting, hiring, and retaining seniors for positions in business and not-for profit organizations (Sullivan & Duplaga, 1997). However, a substantial proportion of the studies cited in the articles have been generic and have not focused on small business in general or small retailing in particular (Greller & Stroh, 2004). Further, some of the literature contains narratives reflecting the authors' opinions and case studies of individual firms, rather than statistical analysis which considers multiple companies (Bell, 2001). While valuable, these inquiries do not provide comprehensive coverage of the status of small retail business employment patterns. Studies indicate that the workforce in the United States is aging rapidly and will continue to do so well into the twenty-first century ( Purcell, 2005; Fusaro, 2001). Current labor shortages were caused by unusually low birth rates among Baby Boomers and recent (sometimes early) retirements by these individuals. In turn, the shortages are particularly acute in various skill-demanding occupations, and in some parts of the country. Given the relatively small magnitude of new entrants into the labor force and the potentially large number of Boomer retirements on the horizon, labor shortages are likely to become significant during upcoming decades. …

The birth rate has already passed the wartime peak and is now rapidly declining. The record 1943 crop of 3,100,000 babies will probably be reduced to about 2,640,000 in 1944 and to 2,100,000 yearly by the time the war ends. Immediately after the war a temporary revival is to be expected as the backlog of postponed marriages is consumed and as ex-servicemen return to their families. In the long run the postwar trend will again be downward, unless there are some basic changes in the pattern of family limitation, which has continued even during the wartime "baby boom." The recent upsurge in the birth rate should not lull us with a false sense that the problems of a declining birth rate have been solved.

Just before the war experts on population trends were saying that the trend of increases in population would be retarded. In the first 30 years of this century the population rise for the nation averaged 2.25 per cent per year. It was said that the increase for the 50 years after 1930 would be on the order of about 0.5 per cent per year. Since 1940 the rate of increase has been near an average of 1.5 per cent annually, which is due in part to unusually favorable civilian mortality during the war years but is mostly attributable to the so-called "baby boom" of that period. Because of a general shift from rural to urban centers that has been going on for some years and was accelerated in wartime, many cities have continued rather high rates of growth during the current decade in excess of the national

A stationary U.S. population: The idea raises fears of economic stagnation in the minds of many businessmen who have been accustomed to the built-in growth factor that stems from an ever increasing number of potential customers. But it is a goal to be attained as soon as possible in the eyes of many environmentalists and neo-Malthusian demographers, who urge immediate government action either through control or coercion (by tax policy, for example) to reduce fertility. Granted, the U.S., unlike much of the rapidly growing underdeveloped world, does not face threats of famine or overcrowding anytime soon. The U.S. could increase its population fivefold and be no more densely crowded than France is now. Rather, it is the impact of a rising population on efforts to control pollution or improve social well-being and the burden that the affluent 6% of the world's people who live in the highly industrialized U.S. place on all the world's nonrenewable ...

It is argued that there is no population explosion and that the prob lems of undernutrition pollution and lack of industrial capacity are due to the greed of the developed nations who consume most of the worlds food and other resources. The U.S. currently is below population replacement level as is most of Western Europe. There is no reason to believe the high birth rates of the Third World nations will continue. The fast growth rates are likely a temporary phenomena just as the "baby boom" of the U.S. in the 1950s was. The problems of malnutrition and pollution can only be solved if the affluent nations are willing to trim back their standard of living. In the meantime the medical profession will have to change its focus to deal with adult (aged 15-65) and elderly patients because children will constitute an ever smaller proportion of the population. The medical profession also needs to keep a sense of perspective when overpopulation extremists try to enlist professional support for laws forbidding more than 2 children euthanasia or triage.

It is the main purpose of this paper to examine in detail the pattern of fertility fluctuations in the United States since the Second World War and to define, with some precision, the questions these patterns raise for students of fertility behavior.

Speculations and assumptions In most of the highly-developed countries, a tendency towards a sharply declining birth rate was apparent during the whole of the 1960’s. In some countries, the birth rate rose to some extent at the end of the fifties, but began once again to fall by the mid-sixties. For a number of countries, such as France, Italy and Great Britain, it appears that the year 1964 represented a turning point in development. In Finland, the birth rate has shown a clear decline since the end of the 1940’s, when the large groups of post-war children were born. Thus, during the period 1947—70 the number of live births fell from 28.0 to 13.9 per thousand of population (Figure 1). One would have expected a new »baby boom» when the large age-classes reached a fertile age at the beginning of the sixties. This did not happen, and instead it was possible to discern a continued declining tendency. A great deal of speculation has been concerned with the reasons for this development, which is directly contrary to previous experience. Probably, these reasons are to be found in several jointly operating circumstances. If one leaves out of account those features of development which have gradually led to an increasingly lower fertility in the industrial countries (cf. Lento, p. 80-105, 1956), the following reasons remain as conceivably possessing more or less special relevance in regard to the development in Finland. 1. During the rapid process of urbanisation of the postwar years, the agrarian world of ideas, which had earlier set its stamp upon thought and action among the great majority of Finland’s people, yielded ground very quickly to new norms and opinions. 2. Examples and the way of life that characterise the relatively high standard of living in the southern, and comparatively greatly industrialised and urbanised parts of the country, are spreading to »developing areas» in the north and east. 3. The rapid development towards an educated community has led to greater equality between the sexes: the number of career women is rising.

The subject of my dissertation is the fertility of American women since 1920. A quick review of the movements in the birth rate will show why this has been such a baffling phenomenon to economists. The prosperity of the twenties was accompanied by a birth rate which fell with unprecedented rapidity. The Great Depression saw an end to the precipitous decline, and the birth rate remained at a low level until the end of the decade. After World War II, the birth rate rose to a relatively high plateau and remained there through the mid-fifties. This period of the "baby boom" was followed in the sixties by a "baby bust" which saw the birth rate plunge to its lowest level in United States history. A capsule box score shows two periods (the Great Depression and the "baby boom") in which variations in the birth rate appear to be easily explicable in narrowly economic terms, and two periods (the twenties and the sixties) in which they do not. Richard Easterlin' has tried to break this tie by suggesting a set of hypotheses which would unify these periods into one economically meaningful framework. Easterlin and other authors who have attempted to specify models of economic-demographic interaction have proceeded at high levels of aggregation forced upon them by grave data availability problems. In order to study fertility at a more disaggregrated level, I have compiled birth probability cross-sections for native white women in each year from 1920 through 1940, and for all white women in every year from 1947 through 1965. Each cross-section refers to women of a particular age classified by the number of children already borne. These data suggest that Easterlin's emphasis on using economic factors specific to women in their early childbearing years to explain movements in the birth rate may be misleading because the birth probabilities of women in all childbearing ages change in a (roughly) proportional manner over time. A dummy variable regression technique is used to partition birth probability matrices specific for birth order into three multiplicative components. One refers to the age of the women, another to their birth cohorts, and the third to the year in which the birth occurs. For example, the probability that a 20-year-old woman who has had no children has a child in 1950 is expressed as the product of a factor common to all 20-year-old women, a factor common to all first births in 1950, and a factor representing the cohort of women born in 1930. Using birth probabilities specific for the number of children already born allows us to consider separately factors which affect the timing of births and those which alter desired family size. Variations in birth

A time series fertility equation considering the economic aspects of fertility supports a cyclical model of fertility relating fertility to standard of living: as standard of living increases relative to desired standard of living fertility increases. The influences of demand factors are explored using standard utility theory with the household as a utility function defined over goods (those of adults G and those of children GN) leisure (TL) and children (N). When the utility function is maximized Y = w(T-TL) = pG nPGGN with Y equalling income w equalling wage rate and p equalling the price of goods consumed by adults ptg or by children pN. The demand for children (Dt) is f(pN p wT X). Population density is substituted as an indirect proxy measure of the relative price of children and Dt = f(URBAN wT X) with X as a taste factor the influence of societal norms. wT (full income) corrected for unemployment equals Ew where E = 1-U where U equals unemployment rate. Ew With child mortality low the influence of supply factors is defined as the demand tdt minus unplanned children. Fertility is therefore Ft = Dt aSt - Dt)Pt where Ft is fertility at time t Dt is demand at time t St is supply or fecundity at time t and Pt is the failure rate of birth control. The equation was tested by substituting actual values for variables using fertility rate data from the period 1926-1975. Results support the cycl ical element of fertility and the hypothesis that an increase in the current standard of living relative to the desired standard of living increases fertility. The implication of these results is that an upswing in the rate of growth of real wages could cause a new baby-boom in as relative wages increase and offset the drag on fertility of the increasing costs of children.

American society is by no means so new that it has not yet experienced the problem of adjustment to the full cycle of the relations among the generations.' There is, however, a sense in which the problem of the status of the oldest age groups has been coming to be increasingly salient in recent times. For one thing, the long history of expansion has-in conjunction with a system of values which has stressed activism-been one in which an accent on youth has been natural. Not only have we expanded territorially and industrially, but we have had a rapidly increasing population, both by natural increase and by immigration. Therefore, relatively speaking, through most of our history we have had an abnormally low proportion of older people in the population. Several processes of change have combined to alter this emphasis. The most obvious is the demographic change which has resulted in a large increase in the proportion of older persons in the population. For example, the proportion over 65 will have risen from 4.1 per cent in i900 to about double that-namely, 8.2 per cent in i95o-and the trend is still upward. Not only has the proportion of older people greatly increased, but their average state of health has greatly improved. The increase in the proportion of the old is all the more important because of the baby boom of the last twenty years. Hence the fact that we have a population which bulges at both ends of the life cycle while, for the time being, it is relatively thin in the middle years. A second major set of changes concerns certain aspects of the structure of the society on levels affecting most directly the positions of individuals. The two most fundamental foci in this respect are the household and occupational work. The tendency in both respects has been towards progressively increasing differentiation, though the two cases are very different. In the case of the household, the central trend has been that of the isolation of the nuclear family. More and more, the typical household has come to consist in a married couple and their own children. In particular, two categories of * A.B. I924, Amherst College; studied at London School of Economics, 1924-25; Ph.D. I927, Heidelberg University. Professor of Sociology, Harvard University. Chairman, Department of Social Relations, Harvard University, 1946-56. Author, THE STRUCTURE OF SOCIAL ACTION (2d ed. 1949); THE SOCIAL SYSTEM, ESSAYS IN SOCIOLOGICAL THEORY (rev. ed. I958); STRUCTURE AND PROCESS IN MODERN SOCIETIES (I960); co-author, [with Robert F. Bales & Edward A. Shils] WORKING PAPERS IN THE THEORY OF ACTION (I953); [with Robert F. Bales] FAMILY SOCIALIZATION AND INTERACTION PROCESS (1955); [with Neil J. Smelser] ECONOMY AND SOCIETY (1956); editor, [with Edward A. Shils] TOWARD A GENERAL THEORY OF ACTION (195I); [with Edward A. Shils, Kaspar D. Naegele & Jesse R. Pitts] THEORIES OF SOCIETY (I96I); translator, MAX WEBER, THE PROTESTANT ETHIC AND THE SPIRIT OF CAPITALISM (1956), and THE THEORY OF SOCIAL AND ECONOMIC ORGANIZATION (ist Am. ed. 1947). 1 Cf. Talmon, Aging in Israel-A Planned Society, 67 AM. J. SOCIOLOGY 284 (196I), for an interesting discussion of the impact of this problem on the Kibbutzim in Israel.

tinued growth of the United States population. The Commission authors also stated, ".. .our population has a potential for further growth greater than that of almost any other advanced country" (Commission, 1972:13). Despite the recent decline in the birth rate, the Commission regards another baby boom as likely in the immediate future, unless postponement of childbearing or reduction in average family size characterizes an increasing number of people in the prime childbearing ages of 20 to 29. Clearly, the attitudes of the young toward family size and planning are most relevant to future population trends and policy issues. In the present study the investigators explored attitudes relevant to family planning; differences in attitudinal dimensions by religion, social class, and sex; and the relationship of these dimensions to the number of children people want.

Japan experienced a precipitous decline in fertility during the decade following the postwar baby boom of 1947-49, and then her fertility rates leveled off. The rapid decline in fertility paralleled liberalization of abortion laws and an active campaign to disseminate contraceptive information. Given these developments and the apparent subordination of women in Japanese culture, one might be inclined to ascribe the fertility decline to increased availability of abortions and other means of birth control and to doubt the explanatory relevance of economic theory which emphasizes the effects of rising wages and educational attainment of women on fertility. The conclusion that emerges from this study, however, is that the basic economic forces identified by the new economic theory of household decision making have been operating to produce a considerable part of the observed differentials and trends in Japanese fertility.' Indeed, increased use of abortion and contraceptive devices appears to have been induced to some extent by economic forces.2