Population and Society E-Book

Gregg Lee Carter

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 559

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2016

Beschreibung

This exciting new book presents the field of social demography, animating the study of population with a vibrant sociological imagination. Gregg Lee Carter provides multiple demonstrations of how taking a demographic perspective can give us a better understanding of social phenomena once thought to be largely the products of culture, politics, or the economy. Five key chapters concentrate on (1) the social and individual determinants of fertility, mortality, and migration; (2) the social and individual impacts of changing levels of fertility, mortality, and migration; and (3) the impacts of overpopulation on the environment, and how changes in the environment, in turn, impact the human condition, especially regarding migration. What gives these analyses coherence is how each emphasizes the ways in which demographic forces both reflect and limit individual choices. Written in a straightforward and engaging style, and without getting bogged down in academic debates, this concise book is the ideal introduction and primer for courses in social demography and population and society.

Leseprobe

Copyright page

Copyright © Gregg Lee Carter 2016

The right of Gregg Lee Carter to be identified as Author of this Work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

First published in 2016 by Polity Press

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Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK

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Malden, MA 02148, USA

All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-6837-6

ISBN-13: 978-0-7456-6838-3 (pb)

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Carter, Gregg Lee, 1951- author.

    Population and society : an introduction / Gregg Lee Carter.

        pages    cm

    Includes bibliographical references and index.

    ISBN 978-0-7456-6837-6 (hardback : alk. paper) – ISBN 978-0-7456-6838-3 (pbk. : alk. paper)    1.  Population–Social aspects.    I.  Title.

    HB849.44.C37 2016

    304.2–dc23

                    2015031295

Typeset in 10 on 12 pt Sabon

by Toppan Best-set Premedia Limited

Printed and bound in the US by RR Donnelley

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Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been inadvertently overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.

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Dedication

For Jack, Betsy, and Lisa,

for their love, joy, peace, patience, and kindness…

Acknowledgments

The following individuals carefully reviewed Population and Society: An Introduction, for which I am greatly appreciative: Drs Walter F. Carroll (Bridgewater State University), William Egelman (Iona College), and Thomas W. Ramsbey (Emeritus, Rhode Island College). Dr William H. Kory (University of Pittsburgh at Johnstown) also reviewed Chapter 1, while Drs Paul Lokken and Antoine Joseph (Bryant University) reviewed parts of Chapter 5. Of course none of them bears responsibility for any errors of omission or commission that might have crept into my final manuscript.

The staff of Bryant University is cheery and always accommodating: Administrative assistants Joanne Socci and Sue Wandyes performed many valued support services. Bryant has a first-rate university library, with a uniformly excellent staff. Head reference librarian Laura Kohl was very helpful, as were her associates Jenifer Bond, Erica Cataldi-Roberts, and Cheryl Richardson. Extra special thanks to Ms Kohl's associates Mackenzie Dunn and Allison Papini, both of whom consistently assisted me in locating my most arcane reference materials.

Regarding translations and interpretations of selected details about Chinese society, I would like to thank my bilingual Bryant University colleagues Professors Yun Xiao, Hong Yang, and Chen Zhang, as well as Mr. Kongli Liu (Associate Director of Bryant's US–China Institute). I am grateful to additional Bryant colleagues Professors David Lux and Michael Bryant for their support in helping me receive a research sabbatical, a critical resource for allowing me to complete this book in a timely manner.

Lindsey A. Bailey and Pamela Wasserman at the nonprofit organization Population Connection (http://www.populationconnection.org) graciously helped me gain approval for my use in Chapter 2 of still images from the organization's highly respected video entitled World Population Growth. Pastor Matt Kottman of Disciples Church (Leatherhead, UK) graciously granted permission to use the photo of Mumbai in Chapter 2. The epigraph by Castles, de Hass, and Miller at the start of Chapter 5 has been reprinted with permission of Guilford Press.

At Polity Press, senior commissioning editor Jonathan Skerrett was enthusiastic and encouraging of this project from the start. Moreover, his editorial advice was measured and consistently helpful. Justin Dyer served as an excellent copyeditor.

Finally, on a personal note, I want to thank my wife, Lisa, for her unending encouragement, and my children – Travis, Kurtis, Alexis, and Davis – for their love and forbearance.

Gregg Lee Carter

Bryant University

Smithfield, Rhode Island

Introduction

This book presents the field of demography from the perspective of social demography. In this approach, the classic concepts of demography are imparted – including theories and measurements of population size, distribution, composition, and change – while at the same time a stronger emphasis is placed than in a standard demography textbook on their connections to the culture, the economy, the polity, the society, and, ultimately, the choices individuals make in their everyday lives.

The present volume offers the basics, animates the sociological imagination, and throughout gives multiple demonstrations on how taking a demographic perspective can give us a better understanding of phenomena once thought to be largely the products of the culture, the polity, or the economy. Demography does not explain everything, of course, but there is a demographic component to the explanation of virtually all contemporary social problems, as well as in the genesis of many individual-level attitudes and behaviors. Many observers, many students, are unaware of this component and are often surprised at its power when it is brought into the discussion.

For example, what accounts for the rise and vitality of a women's movement in a particular society at a particular time in history? To wit, why the rise of the women's movement in the United States in the late 1960s? Why not the late 1940s or, say, the 1950s? There are volumes written on this topic, but a key part of the explanation resides in the demographic concept of the marriage squeeze. Women typically marry men of their age or a few years older – at least for their first marriages. The US baby boom after World War II produced some 5 million women in their 20s without traditional marriage partners (men of their age or slightly older) by 1970. How? Each year between 1946 and 1957, the number of births increased. When the women born in a particular year got out of high school or college and started looking around for good marriage material, they would have been searching for partners born a few years before them – when a smaller number of men had been born. Thus, starting in the mid-1960s, each year the pool of unmarried women began to grow. The applicable sex ratios (number of men per 100 women) for people in their 20s changed dramatically during the late 1960s. For example, in 1960, there were 111 men in the 22–6 age bracket for every 100 women in the 20–4 age bracket; by 1970, the comparable sex ratio had fallen to 84. Traditional female gender role aspirations (wife, mother, homemaker, and working only part-time to supplement the family's income) became unattainable for some 5 million young women – providing a key seed from which the modern women's movement sprouted.

This kind of analysis, bringing the demographic perspective to bear on a variety of contemporary social issues, appears throughout this volume. What gives these analyses coherence is how each emphasizes the ways in which demographic forces both reflect and limit individual choices. Although virtually no contemporary social issue can be truly understood without taking demography into consideration, the topics receiving the most attention in the present volume are (1) the social and individual determinants of fertility, mortality, and migration; (2) the social and individual impacts of changing levels of fertility, mortality, and migration; and (3) the impacts of overpopulation on the environment, and how changes in the environment, in turn, impact the human condition, especially regarding migration.

The sociological perspective and how major social institutions interact with demographic processes are central to the field of social demography and to this book. For example, the institution of the family has undergone dramatic transformations in the past half-century and these transformations are closely entwined with fertility, mortality, and migration. As developed in Chapters 2 and 4 during discussions of demographic transition theory, for most of human history, high death rates encouraged human cultures worldwide to have a “be fruitful and multiply” value orientation – with the clan, tribe, or society at risk of extinction if it did not adopt this orientation. This created a very long period, actually most of human history, of traditional gender roles – with women spending the bulk of their fertile years either pregnant or breast-feeding, and thus restricting their food-generating and economic productive activities to the home or very close to it (e.g., foraging nearby plants or tending nearby gardens). After a society brought down its death rate, during the nineteenth and first half of the twentieth centuries in Europe and northern America, and during a much shorter period after World War II in the developing areas of Asia, Africa, and Latin America, cultural norms regarding keeping fertility rates high and women constrained to traditional gender roles could be relaxed. Lower birth rates freed women to increase their levels of education and to enter the paid labor force in large numbers. This both encouraged and was encouraged by couples viewing small families as advantageous, both for themselves, in being able to fulfill their own potential, and for their children, in that fewer children allowed for increased investments (e.g., educationally) in each individual child whom the couple did have. Eventually, a balance of low death rates and low birth rates was achieved. However, in recent decades the cultural emphasis on individual development has intensified and spread both geographically and socially to the point where large numbers of individuals have begun (a) delaying marriage; (b) delaying the age at which they have their first child; (c) reconceptualizing family size, such that having few children – and even no children – is seen as beneficial both to themselves as individuals and to the greater society (e.g., not contributing to “overpopulation” and its attendant problems); and (d) creating and accepting new family forms, including cohabitation without marriage, same-sex unions/marriages, single-parent families, and blended families (with divorced individuals and children from prior unions and marriages coming together to form new families via remarriage or cohabitation). These four trends have become known as the second demographic transition and have resulted in birth rates falling below death rates in an increasing number of societies (see Chapters 2 and 4). The upside has been the increased chances of each individual realizing his or her full potential. But the downside is the creation of new social problems affecting an increasing number of countries: When the average woman in a society has fewer than two children in her lifetime, one to replace herself and one to replace a male, the younger generation becomes smaller relative to prior generations. As longevity has increased dramatically in both the developed and developing worlds (see Chapter 3), the burdens on the young generation to support the healthcare and related needs of their aging parents and grandparents rise dramatically. One solution is to encourage immigration, such that the younger generation is bulked up in size by the immigrant population (who tend to be young working adults and thereby can add substantial resources to the younger native generation). In sum, we see the intimate interplay between the changing social institution of the family and how it is impacted by, and in turn impacts, changing rates of mortality, fertility, and migration.

Population and Society is comprised of five main chapters, plus a substantial References section, and a detailed Index. Each chapter ends with a Main Points and Key Terms section, a set of Review Questions, and an annotated list of Suggested Readings and Online Sources. The ultimate goal is to stimulate the reader to better understand how his or her life has been, is, and will continue to be influenced by large and powerful demographic forces; and how, despite being a daunting undertaking, these forces can be reined in and controlled by the choices we make – as individuals, as well as by the group-level decisions we make in our families, neighborhoods, communities, nations, and international bodies.

1Overview of Population Study

Population trends significantly influence individual experience and national policies; they may cause, or provide necessary conditions for, the occurrence of major social, economic, and cultural changes. … Some knowledge of population is therefore essential to the rational understanding of the world we live in.

Dennis H. Wrong (1990)

Classic Demography: Population Size, Distribution, Composition, and Change

Demography is the formal study of human populations. In practice, classic demography studies the size of a population in a given geographic area (e.g., how many hundreds, thousands, or millions of people live in it); the distribution of the population within the area (e.g., the percentage living in rural areas, in small towns, in suburbs, in cities); the composition of the population (most commonly, breakdowns by age and sex); and the change of the population (growth or decline) between specific time points (e.g., 2016 to 2017) – as determined by the number of births (fertility), deaths (mortality), and migrants to and from the area (migration).

Table 1.1 and Figure 1.1 illustrate how three nations – India, the United Kingdom , and the United States – would be described from the approach of classic demography. Figure 1.1 displays the population pyramid for each nation, a heuristic device to help us get a better grasp of a specific population through a graphic representation of the size, age, and sex information in Table 1.1.

Table 1.1:    Classic demographic characteristics of India, the United Kingdom, and the United States

Figure 1.1:

    Population pyramids for India, the United Kingdom, and the United States

Source

:  Raw data from United Nations (2016a, 2016b)

Notice how different the pyramids look, with the United Kingdom and the United States being shaped somewhat like a beehive, while India appears more like a standard pyramid. The narrow bases of the United Kingdom and the United States reveal that they have, relative to India, small populations of youths, while India has a much wider base – revealing a much higher percentage of its population under 40. Moving upward on these pyramids, the United Kingdom and the United States reveal broader middle and broader top sections, indicating that they have, proportionally speaking, many more middle-aged and older individuals.

These two shapes are typical throughout the 267 political states and territories of the world, with those that are economically developed usually having more beehive-shaped pyramids, those that are developing revealing more standard-looking pyramids (bases tend to be wide, while tops tend to be narrow), and those that are the least developed displaying very standard-looking pyramids (very wide bases and very narrow tops). Finally, notice how the male and female age groups tend to be of equal horizontal length until the very oldest groups (70 and over) for the United Kingdom and United States, while for India, the younger ages favor males – revealing a skewed sex ratio. (The biological expectation for a human population is close to an even split between the sexes: At birth, about 51% male and about 49% female; male infants naturally have a higher mortality rate during the first year of life, so after very early childhood, a 50–50 split is expected until very old age, when females again have a biological edge and their proportion increases.)

An important observation regarding the preceding paragraph needs to be made here as the level of socioeconomic development is a critical variable in cross-national social demographic analysis. The United Nations labels as more developed the nations of Europe, plus Australia, Canada, Japan, New Zealand, and the United States – all prosperous by world standards. It labels as less developed all the nations of Asia (save for Japan), as well as most of those in Latin America, the Caribbean, and Oceania (the South Pacific); in addition, about 40% of African nations have the “less developed” label (“less developed” nations are on the road to prosperity, but still have a long way to go – examples include both China and India). Finally, the UN labels as least developed those nations that are extremely poor – where malnutrition, infectious disease, and early death are common; the majority of these countries are in Africa (34 of its 55 nations); nine are in Asia, one in the Caribbean (Haiti), and four in Oceania (see United Nations 2010, 2013a). Throughout this book, “more developed” and “economically developed” will be used interchangeably, while “less developed” and “least developed” will often be labeled “developing.”

Classic demographic analysis tries to build models that both describe and predict variations in a key demographic variable. The variable being predicted in all sciences, including demography, is labeled the dependent variable (in everyday English, we say the outcome, the effect, the consequence), and a variable used to predict a dependent variable (again, in all sciences) is called an independent variable (synonyms in everyday English include cause of, reason for). For example, why do fertility rates tend to be higher in poorer societies? In the case of Table 1.1, why do women in the United Kingdom and the United States tend to have fewer children than women in India? Demographic transition theory, which will be more fully developed later in this chapter and in Chapter 2, quite logically predicts that if a society has a high death rate and is to survive into the future, then it must develop a culture that emphasizes “be fruitful and multiply” – that is, it must have a high birth rate. Indeed, we can see that India's infant mortality rate is much higher than the rate in either the United Kingdom or the United States, just as predicted. More generally, Figure 1.2 reveals that there is a strong and consistent pattern across the nations of the world for infant mortality and fertility to be positively related – a greater level of mortality is associated with a greater probability of having a high fertility rate.

Figure 1.2:

    The strong relationship between infant mortality and fertility (with selected countries identified)

Source

:  Raw data from Population Reference Bureau (2012);

N

 = 210 countries

Social Demography: The Interplay between Population Characteristics and Culture, Economy, Polity, Society, and Individual Choice

A social scientist examining Figure 1.1 immediately begins wondering what the implications of these shapes are for the people living in each country, and, further, wonders why the shapes developed as they did (e.g., Why so many young people in India when compared to the United Kingdom and United States? Why so many males versus females in India compared to the other two nations, where the numbers tend to be more equal?). This kind of curiosity spawned the field of social demography, which extends classic demographic concepts of population size, distribution, composition, and change into the realms of the culture, the economy, the polity, the society, and the constraints on and opportunities for the choices individuals make. The constructs from this new realm serve as both independent and dependent variables: that is, they have effects on the variables of classic demography (population size, distribution, composition, and change), and these classic demographic variables, in turn, affect the culture, and so on. Social demography also expands the list of population composition variables to include many cultural, economic, political, and social constructs – examples include ethnicity, family structure, occupation, race, governing regime type, religion, social class, and value orientations.

To illustrate social demographic analysis, let's continue the discussion of the concept of the sex ratio brought up in the Introduction. The sex ratio, the number of men per 100 women, is deemed balanced when it is 100 – or very close to it. A balanced ratio means that half the population is male and half is female. As the ratio becomes imbalanced, tending to 90, or even lower, or tending to 110, or even higher, it has effects that ripple throughout society. As observed in the Introduction, a society that develops a low ratio has an increased chance of experiencing a women's movement. The linchpin interpretation is that

unlike the high sex ratio situation, women would find it difficult to achieve economic mobility through marriage [and thus] … [t]hey might try to achieve economic and political independence for themselves and other women. We would expect various forms of feminism to be accelerated [and] … the attempt on the part of women to establish themselves as independent persons in their own right.

(Guttentag and Secord 1983: 20–1)