SOCIOL Final Flashcards Chapter 23
(41 cards)
The population bomb
Paul Erlich believed that the world’s population was growing much too quickly and that this ticking time bomb would soon have catastrophic effects.
Demography
The study of population
Census
A count of everyone living in a particular location
Enumerate
Systematically count
Domesday Book
Identified all the landowners and land holdings in an effort to improve tax collection
Social demography
Uses population to study societal trends
Population-based trends that social demographers study
-Racial and ethnic composition
-Marriage and family
-Employment issues
-Life expectancy
Stylized facts
Empirical information we can surmise or determine with a great deal of certainty
Population dynamics
Concerns how the size of any place or group has changed, either in the past or how it changing in the present or the future
Demography’s big three
1) Fertility
2) Morality
3) Migration
Fertility
the birth rate, typically measured by the number of live births per female of childbearing years
Morality
typically measured by the number of deaths in a particular calendar year
Migration
how many people move into and out of a given region or country
Reasons to study population
1) Taxes and military efforts
2) Infrastructure
3)Political boundaries (seats in congress)
4) Economy and investments
The first demographic transition
The transition by a region or country from a period of high fertility and high mortality to a period of low fertility and low mortality
Three historical demographic periods
Pre-transition, mid-transition, and posttransition
What does the first demographic transition involve ?
1) An initial pretransition period characterized by high fertility and high morality
2) A transitional period in which mortality first declines followed by a decline in fertility
3) A posttransition period in which both fertility and mortality are low
The total fertility rate
Our measure of fertility
Age Pyramids
A diagram that plots the age distribution of a population, with the numbers at the youngest ages at the bottom of the graph and the numbers at the oldest ages at the top, and with males and females on the left- and right-hand sides, respectively.
Replacement fertility
A level of fertility in which individuals in a population, on average, have a sufficient number of offspring that will imply, over the long run, no change in the size of the population.
Population momentum
The tendency of a population that has been changing in size to continue to change in size even if factors such as fertility and mortality have shifted to levels that would, in the long run, imply no change in population size.
What are the two changes that affected fertility according to the birth control hypothesis ?
1) the growing acceptance of the view that people can (and should) exercise control over their fertility
2) technological advances in the means by which women and couples can control their fertility.
Agrarian societies
the overwhelming majority lived in rural areas and worked as farmers, sharecroppers, peasants, or other agricultural workers
What is the costs/benefits hypothesis of fertility decline ?
fertility decline results from the costs and benefits of having and raising children.
