SOC 101 Lecture Notes - Lecture 16: Malthusian Trap, Thomas Robert Malthus
Document Summary
Demographic transition: education, mortality, and gender equality. Interested in four main aspects of population: Health: the study of death makes demography inherently interested in health. Focused on health of populations, not individual health. Statistically oriented: dominated by statistical methods, largely counts people to give numerical evidence about how populations are changing. Because demographers are interested in population changes, they depend on data about the population. Provide data on deaths, births, movements, and aging. Thomas malthus: english, 1766-1834, often considered a founding figure of demography. Analyzed data on how the population of north america was growing dramatically. He recognized that the food supply only increases arithmetically, populations increase exponentially. To analyze populations, demographers use a variety of statistics. Mortality rate: number of deaths per 1,000 people. Birth rate: number of live births per 1,000 people. Population growth rate: % change in a populations size in one year. Dependent on three things: (1) birth rate, (2) death rate, (3) population transfers.
