The chapters in this first section of the book come from the early part of Richard Titmuss’s career. Most of them were written before social policy had even started to become an official, academic subject, and before politicians and governmental decision-makers had begun seriously to entertain the idea of social science as a routine source of practical information to aid government policy. The themes of the chapters spell out a number of critical social issues which have subsequently become the focus of enormous policy interest and academic debate. In these early works, Richard Titmuss was anticipating the growth of the discipline to which his own name would be indissolubly linked, but he was also predicting policy concerns that would become an important focus of attention well into the 21st century: class inequalities in health and life-chances; the survival of The Family; the possibility of evidence-informed social policy; and the position of women.

Titmuss’s origins as a social scientist lie in his work in the insurance industry, where the vital statistics of birth and death forged in him an enduring interest in the quantity and the quality of the population (Oakley, 1996). This was the focus of the first three of his books, Poverty and population (1938), Parents revolt (1942) and Birth, poverty and wealth (1943). Chapter One, ‘The nation’s wealth’, comes from Parents revolt, a slim, angry volume printed on cheap war quality paper, co-authored with Titmuss’s wife Kathleen. The book hypothesises a connection between the growth of acquisitive social values and the tendency of people to have fewer children. It argues that a nation’s true wealth is not what we would today call its ‘gross national product’; rather, the wealth of a nation inheres in the vitality of its people, and especially in people from all social classes. Written against the backdrop of the Second World War, it is not surprising to find the Titmusses noting that the whole enterprise of Britain’s part in the war would have been impossible without the ‘cannon fodder’ supplied by large, working class families; differential fertility can be a matter of national convenience.

Parents revolt contends that, when national birth-rates fall, the welfare of nation states is threatened. More globally, the move away from parenthood may even signal the ‘biological failure’ of capitalism.