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| INTRODUCTION.
TO.
DEMOGRAPHY.
IN.
SOCIOLOGY |
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| Demography is about population size
and its changes. Strictly speaking, this is not a social variable, because
it includes people rather than symbols. Population size, however,
like the physical environment, is an important factor that independently
affects social variables, and is also a dependent variable affected by
social variables. Along with the six cultural dimensions of a community,
an ethnographer
is urged to observe and report on those two variables, population size
and the physical environment. |
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| Perhaps Thomas Malthus was the first
demographer. He calculated that human population was increasing at a geometric
rate while the food supply was increasing at only an arithmetic rate, and
that the world population was on a collision course with over population,
starvation and pestilence. Many demographers today believe that a
similar disaster is in our future. |
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| Social scientists point out that
world starvation is the product of poor distribution rather than any absolute
lack of food for the human population. |
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| A useful graphic tool is the age
pyramid, where the size of population is laid out in ranges, youngest at
the bottom, oldest at the top, females on the left, males on the right.
See Age Pyramid and
Dependency Ratio. In least developed countries, where birth rates
are high and mortality rates high, there are many children and few seniors,
relative to the whole population, making the age pyramid short and wide.
In developed countries, where mortality rates are low, as in Nordic countries,
there are many elderly people and few children, relative to the whole population,
and age pyramids are tall and slim. |
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| Populations of communities and countries
get larger for two main reasons, births and immigration. They get smaller
for other reasons, death and emigration. Canada is increasingly looking
like the Nordic countries, and is not reproducing its population because
of low birth rates. To fill the jobs needed, Canada will have to
increasingly depend upon immigration. Meanwhile poor countries go
to much expense of training skilled professionals, and their loss contributes
to the “brain drain” of those countries. |
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| HIV/AIDS affects people of sexually
active ages, which are also those in the economically most active ages.
The death of large parts of a population of those ages results in fewer
professionals, fewer workers of those ages, an increased burden on grandparents
to raise children when they themselves need assistance. This is particularly
acute in Africa. See the mobiliser
training page about AIDS. |
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| It is important to recognize is that
a high birth rate does not cause poverty, but that poverty
causes a high birth rate. |
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