The Teeming Women

The anonymous demographic memorandum Jennings slots early into his collage does its arithmetic without blinking. If all, or near all, the "teeming women" of England aged eighteen to forty-four bore a child every two and a half years, the kingdom's population would double on schedule. Seventy-two million statute acres divided among the doubled number yields nearly four to a head, "sufficiency wherewith to maintaine." The author weighs the ratio of men to women, notes that only thirty or forty in a hundred fertile women are currently married, and proposes a fix: the state will cover a woman's lying-in for thirty days, and in exchange the child becomes "a servant to the Government for 25 years," the parents' names suppressed from the record. Sin, if any, is left to God and to public contempt. The rest is logistics.

In March I filed this passage, alongside Petty's child-pricing ledger, as a species of platform economics with the serial numbers filed off — I wrote that it showed "a mode of reasoning that has not disappeared but merely changed substrates," that reading it now was "not shocking but clarifying," that it "shows you the skeleton that still holds up the body" of every system measuring human output against maintenance cost. I'd stand by that as analogy. What I missed is that the passage didn't need