12. Demographic Transition Flashcards
Malthus and other classical economic thinkers wrote at the start of the nineteenth century, when accelerating ____ and ____ growth were raising demands for food faster than English agriculture could respond.
population and industrial
Thomas ____ (1766-1834) Essay on Population, first published in 1798.
Malthus
Their argument was that limited productive land as well as limits of the supply of capital and labor would determine how many ____ could be supported by a nation.
people
Malthus turned these arguments upside down. He argued that since “sexual passion was a constant” human population would increase ____ (in his words. “geometrically”), while the supply of land, food, and material resources would increase arithmetically.
exponentially
Thus, instead of limited natural resources (land) and labor causing limits to population growth, Malthus believed that population growth caused resources to be overused and the market value of labor to decline. ____ ____ rather than lack of resources and labor produced poverty and human misery.
Population growth
Malthus argued that this cycle was a “____ ___” of population: Each increase in the food supply only meant that eventually more people could live in poverty.
natural law
Malthus was aware that starvation rarely operates directly to kill people, and he thought that war, disease, and poverty were ____ ____ on population growth.
positive checks
Although he held out the possibility of deliberate population controls (____ checks) on population growth, he was not very optimistic about their effectiveness.
preventative
Malthus argued that poverty is an eventual ____ of population growth. Such poverty, he argued, is a stimulus that could lift people out of misery if they tried to do something about it.
consequence
So, he argued, if people remain poor, it is their own ____. He opposed the English Poor Laws (that provided benefits to the poor) because he felt t would actually serve to perpetuate misery by enabling poor people to be supported by others.
fault
One of the most universally observed but still not clearly explained patterns of population growth is termed the ____ ____.
demographic transition
This model of population change has three stages: (1) ____ social organization where mortality and fertility are relatively high; (2) ____ social organization, where mortal ity declines, fertility remains high, and population shows a high rate of natural increase and (3) ____ social organization, where mortality and fertility stabilize at relatively low levels, and near stationary population is possible.
primitive, transitional, modern
_____ transition refers to changes in birth or death rates and the impact on the size and nature of a population. It has four phases.
Demographic
In phase 1. ____ cultures have both high birth and high death rates. During this phase, the population size does not increase very fast at all.
pre-industrial
Phase 2 is called the ‘____ ____’. Death rates drop due to the improved health of the population, including that of infants. The end of phase 2 and the beginning of phase 3 have the highest net growth rates (that is, birth-death rates).
mortality transition
Phase 3 is also called either the industrial stage or the _____ ____. This phase sees the decrease in births that is correlated to a variety of factors.
fertility transition
Phase 4 represents the _____ stage. Populations in this phase have low net growth rates, leading to net zero population growth, and in some cases, a negative net growth rate.
post-industrial
First, ____ upgraded both manufacturing and agricultural productivity so that the economic base could support much larger populations
industrialisation
Second, ____ ____ in the control of epidemic disease and improvements in public services like urban sewerage, water systems, and garbage disposal contributed to improved health and reduced mortality rates.
medical advances
Third, as populations became increasingly urbanized, ____ changes occurred. The children of rural peasants are generally an economic asset: They eat little an and from an early age contribute substantially to the family farm and household. But urban children become more of an economic burden than an asset.
family
Industrialization was also coupled with opportunities for women to work outside the family and eventually improved the ____ of women.
status
Industrial modernisation had, in other words, a variety of incentives that promoted ____ ____.
smaller families
the demographic transition process has meant that beginning with social and economic modernisation, ____ rates declined, followed after a time interval by declining ____ rates.
death, birth
But between these events was a period of ____ ____ when birth rates remained high but death rates rapidly declined. That transitional growth period is what the population explosion since the beginning of the industrial era is all about.
transitional growth
