Introduction to Population PDF

INTRODUCTION TO POPULATION From: Introduction to Sociology, University of Minnesota 2010 PART ONE: Population Growth/Decline Between 2011 and 2012, we reached a population milestone of 7 billion humans on the earth’s surface. The rapidity with which this happened demonstrated an...

INTRODUCTION TO POPULATION From: Introduction to Sociology, University of Minnesota 2010 PART ONE: Population Growth/Decline Between 2011 and 2012, we reached a population milestone of 7 billion humans on the earth’s surface. The rapidity with which this happened demonstrated an exponential increase from the time it took to grow from 5 billion to 6 billion people. In short, the planet is filling up. How quickly will we go from 7 billion to 8 billion? How will that population be distributed? Where is population the highest? Where is it slowing down? Where will people live? To explore these questions, we must study population change. Population change is an important source of other changes in society. The study of population is… called demography. To be more precise, demography is the study of changes in the size and make-up of population. It encompasses several concepts: fertility (birth rates), mortality (death rates), and migration (Weeks, 2012). Let’s look at each of these briefly. Fertility and Birth Rates The fertility rate of a society is a measure noting the number of children born in that society…Sociologists measure fertility using the crude birthrate (the number of live births per 1,000 people per year). Demographers use several measures of fertility. The general fertility rate refers to the number of live births per 1,000 women aged 15–44. The U.S. general fertility rate is about 65.5. Mortality and Death Rates Just as fertility measures childbearing, the mortality rate is a measure of the number of people who die. Demographers measure it with the crude death rate, the number of deaths for every 1,000 people in a population in a given year. Migration Another key element in studying populations is the movement of people into and out of an area. Migration may take the form of immigration, which describes movement into an area to take up permanent residence, or emigration, which refers to movement out of an area to another place of permanent residence. Migration might be voluntary (as when college students study abroad), involuntary (as when Syrian refugees evacuated war-torn areas), or forced (as when many Native American tribes were removed from the lands they’d lived in for generations). Migration can also be either domestic or international in scope. Domestic migration happens within a country’s national borders, like when retired people from a city move to the countryside. International migration happens across national borders. When international immigration is heavy, as it has been into the United States and Western Europe in the last few decades, the effect on population growth and other aspects of national life can be significant. Domestic migration can also have a large impact: when the population of an area increases, the housing market may fluctuate [change rapidly], for example, and traffic might increase. Now that you are familiar with some basic demographic concepts, we can discuss population growth and decline in more detail. Figure 19.6 “International Annual Population Growth Rates (%), 2005–2010” The map above depicts the annual population growth rate of all the nations in the world. Note that many African nations are growing by at least 3% per year or more, while most European nations are growing by much less than 1% or are even losing population. Overall, the world population is growing by about 80 million people annually. When agricultural societies developed some 12,000 years ago, only about 8 million people occupied the planet. This number had reached about 300 million about 2,100 years ago, and by the 15th century it was still only about 500 million. It finally reached 1 billion by about 1850 and by 1950, only a century later, had doubled to 2 billion. Just 50 years later, it tripled to more than 6.8 billion, and it is projected to reach more than 9 billion by 2050 (U.S. Census Bureau, 2010) (see Figure 19.7 “Total World Population, 1950–2050”). However, we see in the bottom half of Figure 19.7 “Total World Population, 1950–2050”, which shows the average annual growth rate for the world’s population, that even though population has increased and will continue to increase, the rate of population is in fact slowing down. This rate has declined over the last few decades and is projected to further decline over the next four decades. This means that while the world’s population will continue to grow during the foreseeable future, it will grow by a smaller rate as time goes by. As Figure 19.6 “International Annual Population Growth Rates (%), 2005–2010” suggested, the growth that does occur will be mostly concentrated in the poor nations in Africa and some other parts of the world. Still, even there the average number of children a woman has in her lifetime dropped from six a generation ago to about three today. PART TWO: Theories of Population Growth Why do populations grow, then? Why do we see this pattern of long term growth from the beginning of humanity? There are several theories [ideas, potential explanations] that attempt to explain. Malthusian Theory Thomas Malthus (1766–1834) was an English clergyman who made dire [scary, terrible] predictions about earth’s ability to sustain its growing population. According to Malthusian theory, three factors control human population and stop them from exceeding the earth’s carrying capacity, [how many people can live in a given area on the amount of available resources there]. Malthus identified these factors as: war, famine, and disease (Malthus 1798). He called these things “positive checks” because they increase mortality [death] rates, thus keeping the population in check. He also identified “preventive checks,” which also control the population by reducing fertility [birth] rates; including birth control and celibacy [deciding not to reproduce]. Thinking practically, Malthus saw that people could produce only so much food in a given year, yet the population was increasing at an exponential rate. Eventually, he thought people would run out of food and begin to starve. They would go to war over increasingly scarce resources and reduce the population to a manageable level, and then the cycle would start again. Of course, this has not exactly happened. The human population has continued to grow long past Malthus’s predictions. So what happened? Why didn’t we die off? There are three reasons sociologists believe we are continuing to expand the population of our planet. First, technological advances in food production have increased both the amount and quality of calories we can produce per person. Second, human ingenuity has developed new medicine to curtail death from disease. Finally, the development and widespread use of contraception [birth control] and other forms of family planning have decreased the speed at which our population increases. But what about the future? Some still believe Malthus was correct and that ample resources to support the earth’s population will soon run out. Zero Population Growth A researcher named Paul Ehrlich brought Malthus’s predictions into the twentieth century. However, according to Ehrlich, it is the environment, not specifically the food supply, that will play a crucial role in the continued health of planet’s population (Ehrlich 1968). Ehrlich’s ideas suggest that the human population is moving rapidly toward complete environmental collapse, as privileged people use up or pollute a number of environmental resources such as water and air. He advocated for a goal of zero population growth (ZPG), in which the number of people entering a population through birth or immigration is equal to the number of people leaving it via death or emigration. While support for this concept is mixed, it is still considered a possible solution to global overpopulation. Fortunately, Malthus and ZPG advocates were wrong to some degree. Although population levels have certainly soared, the projections show that the rate of increase is slowing. Among other factors, the development of more effective contraception, especially the birth control pill, has limited population growth in the industrial world and, increasingly, in poorer nations. Food production has also increased by a much greater amount than Malthus and ZPG advocates predicted. Concern about overpopulation growth has weakened, as the world’s resources seem to be standing up to population growth. Widespread hunger in Africa and other regions does exist, with hundreds of millions of people suffering from hunger and malnutrition, but many experts attribute this problem not to overpopulation and lack of food but rather to problems in distributing the sufficient amount of food that exists. Because most modern societies have economic systems that see food as a commodity to sell, not a basic human right, poor people have less access to it, while rich people have more access to it than they need, resulting in much of earth’s food going to waste. Cornucopian Theory [Theory of Plenty] Unlike the last two theories, Cornucopian theory scoffs at [laughs at, disagrees with] the idea of humans wiping themselves out; it asserts that human ingenuity can resolve any environmental or social issues that develop. As an example, it points to the issue of food supply. If we need more food, the theory contends, agricultural scientists will figure out how to grow it, as they have already been doing for centuries. After all, in this perspective, human ingenuity has been up to the task for thousands of years and there is no reason for that pattern not to continue (Simon 1981). Demographic Transition Theory Other dynamics also explain why population growth did not rise at the geometric rate that Malthus had predicted and is even slowing. The view explaining these dynamics is called demographic transition theory (Weeks, 2012). This theory links population growth to the level of technological development humans have reached across three stages of social evolution: In the first, longest stage of human history, ranging from the prehistoric hunter gatherer period to the ancient world and the middle ages, the birth rate and death rate are both high. The birth rate is high because of the lack of contraception and the several other reasons cited earlier for high fertility rates, and the death rate is high because of disease, poor nutrition, lack of modern medicine, and other problems. These two high rates cancel each other out, and little population growth occurs. In the second stage, which came with the development of industrial societies from the 1600s to the 1900s, the birth rate remains fairly high, owing to the lack of contraception and a continuing belief in the value of large families, but the death rate drops because of several factors, including increased food production, better sanitation, and improved medicine. Because the birth rate remains high but the death rate drops, population growth takes off dramatically. In the third stage, from the early 1900s to the present, the death rate remains low, but the birth rate finally drops as families begin to realise that large numbers of children in an industrial economy are more of a burden than an asset. Another reason for the drop is the availability of effective contraception. As a result, population growth slows, and, as we saw earlier, it has become quite low or even gone into a decline in several industrial nations. Demographic transition theory, then, gives us more reason to be cautiously optimistic regarding the threat of overpopulation: as poor nations continue to modernize—much as industrial nations did 200 years ago—their population growth rates should start to decline. Still, population growth rates in poor nations continue to be high, and inequalities in food distribution allow rampant hunger to persist. Hundreds of thousands of women die in poor nations each year during pregnancy and childbirth. Reduced fertility would save their lives, in part because their bodies would be healthier if their pregnancies were spaced farther apart (Schultz, 2008). Although world population growth is slowing, then, it is still growing too rapidly in much of the developing and least developed worlds. To reduce it further, more extensive family-planning programs are needed, as is economic development in general. PART THREE: Population Control: Pronatalism, Antinatalism, and Migration Restriction Societies often struggle to address concerns of declining birth rates or overpopulation; as a result, some governments attempt to practise population control, or the act of artificially maintaining or controlling the size of a population. Some nations are currently experiencing active population declines, while several more are projected to have population declines by 2050 (Goldstein, Sobotka, & Jasilioniene, 2009). For a country to maintain its population, the average woman needs to have 2.1 children, the replacement level for population stability. But several industrial nations are far below this level. Increased birth control is one reason for their lower fertility rates but so are decisions by women to stay in school longer, to go to work right after their schooling ends, and to not have their first child until somewhat later. Spain is one of several European nations that have been experiencing a population decline because of lower birth rates. Like some other nations, Spain has adopted pronatalist policies to encourage people to have more children; it provides 2,500 euros, about $3,400, for each child. These nations’ population declines have begun to concern demographers and politicians (Shorto, 2008). Because people in many industrial nations are living longer while the birth rate drops, these nations are increasingly having a greater proportion of older people and a smaller proportion of younger people. In several European nations, there are more people 61 or older than 19 or younger. As this trend continues, it will become increasingly difficult to take care of the health and income needs of so many older citizens, and there may be too few younger people to fill the many jobs and provide the many services that an industrial society demands. The smaller labour force may also mean that governments will have fewer income tax dollars to provide these services. To deal with these problems, several governments have initiated pronatalist [encouraging or awarding increased birth rates] policies aimed at encouraging women to have more children. In particular, they provide generous child-care subsidies [money from the government], tax incentives [taxing child-bearing families less], and flexible work schedules designed to make it easier to bear and raise children, and some even provide couples outright cash payments when they have an additional child. Russia in some cases provides the equivalent of about $9,000 for each child beyond the first, while Spain provides 2,500 euros (equivalent to about $3,400) for each child (Haub, 2009). The opposite can happen as well; in some cases when a society is experiencing a massive population increase it can lead to overpopulation, or a population that could exceed the carrying capacity of a country. Overpopulation can lead to issues like housing crises, widespread unemployment, over-stressed infrastructures, and pollution. To counter this, governments may also implement anti-natalist [discouraging childbirth] policies. For example, in an attempt to control population growth, China’s infamous one-child policy prohibited families from having more than one child between 1979 and 2015. Rather than control the natural birth or death rates, some governments and societies prefer to control their populations through migration restriction, the act of limiting or controlling how many people may migrate into or out of a country. Typically, this takes the form of laws and regulations regarding who can move to a country and how many; requirements like work sponsorship and visa applications are the most common examples in developed societies. When industrialised countries experience overpopulation, they are far more likely to introduce migration restrictions than anti-natalist policies. This is due to several factors, most notably the fact that the native populations of many countries have a sense of a shared cultural or ethnic identity that causes them to prioritise the needs and desires of people born in their country over those of people who moved there. This is called nativism. In some cases, countries and governments’ decisions regarding migration restriction are dictated by practical needs. For instance, in the mid-1800s, the United States industrialised rapidly and entered a brutal civil war. As a result, their policies regarding immigration were very lax [relaxed, lenient, tolerant]- immigrants were considered necessary to provide cheap labour for new factories and soldiers for the army. Between 1850 and 1914, approximately 25 million immigrants entered the United States, most of whom required no special passes or visas or had to meet any kind of standards for entry. However, a country can also practise migration control for more emotional or social reasons. After the American Civil War was over and the industrial boom evened out, a large portion of Americans born in the country were unhappy about the volume of foreign-born people in their cities and towns. Racism, anxiety over job availability, and tribal fears of outsiders all contributed to the government’s decision to introduce strict immigration policies, capping the number of immigrants allowed into the US and setting highly selective requirements for those that did come, including the payment of fees for visas, required sponsorship, and passing intelligence tests.