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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. May 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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