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0:00
Rachel Cunningham: Hello and welcome to our lecture on population and demographic transitions. The concept of demographic transitions is pretty crucial in both cultural geography as well as regional geography depending on which course you’re taking. This is applicable for both.
0:19
We’re going to start off touching about talking on how we calculate population and where we see different population clusters on the planet before we get into some of the specific measurements of different demographic principles.
0:34
First off, where do people live? We have a pretty big planet. So, where are folks living? When we look at the geographies of health, of where babies are born, of where folks are dying, we have to look at the population numbers. We can measure populations in several different ways. A very popular one is population density. This is a number of people per area of land. For example, I did some calculations for this lecture. I simply took the entire population of a country.
1:08
I divided that by the entire land square area of that country. I did not include ocean because people don’t live in ocean, we live on land. That’s one way of calculating population. It’s just number of people divided by square kilometers of your country. You also can make this see arithmetic population density. This is when you average that across the entire country. This is the number that you’re most commonly going to report. You’re going to say it's population density, but you
1:41
are actually averaging it for an entire country.
1:46
For example, if you look at some 2018 estimations from the CIA World Factbook, United States had roughly 36 people per square kilometer. That number is hard to picture, especially since the US does not use kilometers. First, you got to think about how big is a square kilometer, but then we’re like what does it mean to have 36 people in one square kilometer? We can compare that to other parts of the world. For example, Bangladesh and South Asia had 1,225 people per square kilometer.
2:23
Japan had 346 people per square kilometer. Again all this is 2018 estimations. As of 2020, if we look at the entire population density for the whole planet, it’s roughly 51.6 people per square kilometer. You can say that the US has roughly less dense than the population global estimate versus both Bangladesh and Japan have a much higher population density. This is what that looks like visually. I am more of a visual person. You might be a number person.
3:04
If you are more of a visual person, this is a great example of how we would map that. This is from SEDAC out of Columbia. Thank you so much for letting us use this map. This is looking at the number of people per square kilometer. Obviously, the darker the red, the higher the number. Again, Bangladesh is going to be over here versus we have Japan over here, and then US over here. You see where there is more people clustered versus less people clustered.
3:39
Again, the darker the red would be the higher the density of people per square kilometer. The problem with population density by just giving you one number is that humans are not evenly spread out over the planet. That’s one of the main features of studying world geography. Human geography is where do people live and why? Humans don’t live everywhere on the planet. They're not evenly spread out. Big chunks of our planet are not very people friendly.
4:12
Living in a desert, for example, is very difficult for humans, mountain areas, and tundra areas. Of course, there are cultures that have adapted to do so. If you look at the wide number of humans, most of them are not clustered in desert or tundra. For example, we have a photograph of Egypt here. This is one of the deserts in Egypt. 98% of the population of Egypt lives in just 3% of Egypt’s total land. If I give you a number of population density for Egypt
4:43
and I just take the entire population of Egypt and divide it by the entire square kilometers of Egypt, you’re not going to get a very realistic number. That number is going to pretend like people live evenly in Egypt when they don’t. That’s just a function of the physical geography landscape of Egypt. There is, of course, a major river in Egypt that more folks are going to live around versus the large desert. Instead, we use something called a physiologic population density.
5:15
We have to talk about something called arable land before we can talk about physiologic population density. Arable land means a land that can be used for farming and agriculture because humans have to eat. If we don't eat, then we don't survive. If we look at a population of a region or a country or a realm, we have to think how are those folks feeding themselves. Of course, there are many countries that rely on fishing. For arable land, we're looking specifically at farming and agriculture.
5:50
What percentage of my land is able to be used to produce food? Obviously, it is possible to farm on mountains. It is more difficult. It is possible to do types of agriculture in the desert. It is more difficult. Arable land is when an event looking at a much smaller percentage of the land area of a country or a region.
6:13
A much better idea of how much land could actually be used by humans. This gives you more accurate representation of how humans are spread out within that country. This physiologic population density, instead of dividing by that-- For example, looking at Egypt again, that 2013 population density, if I just look at the entire square mileage of the whole country, I've got 220 people per square mile. Then if I look at just that arable land, the land
6:47
that's usable for farming, which in Egypt is not very much, it's like 3%, if I look at that physiologic population density, I have 6,800 people per square mile. So, considerably more dense. These are two very different numbers. They give you two very different stories of where the population in Egypt are spread out. You can see why the physiologic population's going to be much more useful if you're looking at how closer together folks are living. If you just want to look at number of people
7:19
versus size of a country, then you can just do the standard population density or the arithmetic population density instead.
7:29
Number one thing that geographers want to talk about is how do we make a map out of this. We got to map it. Dot maps are a very popular way of mapping population. This year, from your textbook, is a dot map that shows each dot. Each single dot is going to be a city that has at least one million people as of 2006. It is a bit old. As of 2006. Every single red dot here shows you a city that has at least a million people. You can see what parts of the world have more large cities.
8:02
The previous map that we had from SEDAC was going to be showing you each dot was going to be a number of people, but the color also change as well. Throughout today's lecture, you'll have sun maps that are going to have you color changing. Of course, this is problematic if your audience-- It's no longer accessible to those who might be color blind. Something cartographers want to think about when they are creating their works is, is this accessible to everyone who
8:29
has different ranges of color vision. This map here, every dot is a city that has a million people. This, of course, excludes all the folks living in cities that are less than a million people. For example, my city is less than a million people, so my city is not on this map. It does exclude those who might be in more rural areas. Again, in an earlier lecture, we talked about the percentage of the planet in different parts of the world that are urban versus rural.
8:57
That's going to vastly change depending on where you're at. This does tell us a specific story. Again, remember when you make a map, you are choosing what story to tell, but the most important thing on this particular map is it highlights our three population clusters. That's going to be East Asia, South Asia and Europe. Now, we've already touched on our European lecture for those of you in my world region lecture or my world regional course, and then we're going to go
9:25
on to South and East Asia after your first mid-term. You can see just from this map here how those are going to have a much higher cluster of these very large cities. Let's go ahead and look at those three regions a little more detailed. Again, East Asia, South Asia and Europe. We're looking at East Asia. Some of the countries we're going to have in East Asia are China, North and South Korea and Japan. Almost a quarter of the world's population lives in this area, in this region.
9:57
We have a lot of large cities, as you saw in that last map, especially in China. We do have some major river systems. We have the Yangtze and the yellow rivers, very large river systems that are then going to provide fresh water, power in terms of dams on these rivers as well as access for farming. In fact, there's a lot of farming in Eastern Asia, both in terms of rice and wheat. You do still have, even though you have a lot of large cities, you
10:30
have a lot of people living in rural areas, more farming communities. Again, that rice and that wheat. You do have a large urban population, but a lot of people are not in urban areas. South Asia that's going to consist of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. Again, we have more major cities. Very large cities that have an excess of a million people. You also have some major river systems. We have the Ganges river and then the Indus river. You'll see a theme here.
11:03
Lots of rivers. Humans need water. If we don't have access to water, humans tend to not do very well. We do see this region rapidly growing. However, it is much more physically confined by mountain ranges. As we go and talk about the South Asia region in the future lectures, you'll see we have the Himalayas in the North and the Karakorum in the West. We are going to have much more restriction space in terms of where folks can move, simply because of the basis that there is a mountain
11:33
ranges restricting the spreading of cities. Then the third is going to be our European cluster. This cluster is significantly smaller than the other two. It's less than half the South Asian cluster. We note there are a lot of rivers in Europe. I talked about multiple rivers in Europe. However, the distribution within Europe is not based on those rivers. Instead, it is based on coalfields. This is a direct response to the spread of the industrial revolution
12:05
in the 1800s as folks used or folks had in more of a need for coal. In order to power all of our steam engines and such, we had to open up new beds of coal. We see more of a spread moving westward or- no, eastward in response to that. You see much more population movement on coalfields and not on rivers, so different than South and East Asia. On top of that, overwhelmingly within Europe, more folks who are living in cities than they are on farm. This is the opposite of East and South Asia.
12:46
Our entire planet is becoming more urbanized. More and more people are moving to urban areas in the cities that Europe has even more so than what we see in East and South Asia. Different type of clustering of folks where they live, so more coalfields and cities versus East and South Asia are going to have more of a rural emphasis on long rivers.
13:12
What about North America? A lot of folks say, "Hey, wait a minute. We've got big cities too. How come we're not a major population center?" If you look at Canada, of course much less sparse. Mexico is most often actually put within the central American realm as well. If you look at the United States, even within the large cluster here in the Southern portion of Mexico and then going into South America or Central America, you don't have nearly as much of that
13:45
density that you do in South and East Asia or within Europe. We do have a different type of geographic phenomenon. This is what it's called a megalopolis. Megalopolis is going to be this big chunk of orangy-red over here on the Eastern seaboard of the United States. This is going to be when you have a massive chunk of cities that all blob together. Over here you've got Boston, New York City, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington DC. You have multiple, very large cities that, again, just
14:19
blob together and you have all other suburbs as well. People who will work in Baltimore but live in a smaller city outside of that, possibly even outside of Maryland. A lot of folks commute here. You might live in New Jersey and commute into New York City, for example. This blob of the population here contains over 20% of the entire US population. Yes, Los Angeles is dense. Yes, San Francisco has some big suburbs, but nothing compared to this right here. Maybe dense is not the right word for Los
14:56
Angeles, I should say sprawling. A lot of people live there, but nothing compared to what we see on the eastern seaboard. Again, this is going to be a megalopolis where you have so much urban interface that it just becomes one giant mega city. [laughs] Although, of course, these five cities have very different personalities. Ask anyone from Boston or New York City or Philadelphia, they have very different city cultures than the other cities listed here.
15:25
Now we've seen where people live on the planet. Let's talk about what kinds of people live where. By kinds, I mean age and gender. Demographics refers to what types of people- again, mostly we talk about age and how many make up a population. There's a lot of vocabulary and a lot of math terms that we're going to use in this section here because a lot of demographics is about counting people. For example, census is one way that we count people. It is one of the more reliable.
16:01
It is not the most reliable, because, of course, depending on what country you're in, there are a lot of politics that influence who gets counted and why. Something that we experiencing very much in the United States about who is being counted and why and different barriers that might be coming up to how different folks are counted. Some of the statistics that we use to discuss demographics are going to be something called dependency ratios.
16:28
This is looking at the number of people who are dependent on someone else to provide a source of income, so people who are not working, total fertility rate, so how many babies are being born per woman. Something called natural increase, which is going to be removing immigration from a country's population. As we see in different parts of the world, immigration can have a major addition into different populations. Removing that number is going to have consequences for your population.
17:03
Crude birth rates. This is just the number of live births per year per 1000 people. We have the babies who are born alive and that is per 1000 people per year. Then the converse of this would be crude death rate. The number of deaths per year per 1000 people. Again, this is just counting numbers. Of course, there are many ways that these numbers might not be entirely accurately calculated. Babies who are born in rural areas or places that maybe they are delivered by a midwife or a local
17:41
woman versus a hospital, so they might not be counted until much later after their birth. First, a home birth, for example, might not be reported to a hospital right away. Some countries don't have a very strict way of counting babies. Again, especially if you're in more rural area those children might just be counted until much later. Same for death rates. Not all deaths are reported. If you have a home burial in some parts of the world where- maybe
18:11
a small village, total number of deaths might not be reported. Of course, people who may go missing also may not be counted as a death as well. How do we make our population get bigger? That's something that many populations are looking at, as I need people to work and bring an income. How do I do that? There are two ways to add to a population. You can have immigration. Folks coming into your country from a different country, or you could have babies.
18:43
That's the two ways that you add to your population. Natural increase is going to refer to just the number of deaths and births in a country. It does not look at immigration or emigration. Immigration with an 'I' is people moving into your country and emigration is people moving out of your country. If you have someone immigrating into your country, that's going to add to your population. If you have someone emigrating out of your country, that's going to subtract from your population.
19:15
Natural increase, however, does not look at either of those numbers. We simply take the number of deaths, you subtract it from the number of births and you get a raw number. Now, when we look at how different countries' populations are changing comparing total population change versus just natural increase can give you some very, very different numbers. This is going to relate to what stage of demographic transition different countries are in. You'll see increasingly, especially
19:45
in Europe, a lot of European countries are very dependent on immigrants coming in largely from North Africa, also from, well, I should say from all over the world but a lot of folks are coming from North Africa, very dependent on that label source.
20:05
This is from 2010 and 2019. This is from the United Nations. This is the average annual rate of population change. The darker the color means the more population change rate is. Higher numbers of change versus the lighter color's going to be negative. For example, you see here much of Europe, much of this is going to be a negative number. These are negative. If we look at just that and I believe this is just looking natural increase, this is going to be populations are shrinking.
20:38
We just hear populations are growing. For context, United States I think was .4 or something, it was less than 1. You can see that populations are not changing evenly across the planet. There are some parts of the world where populations are growing and some parts of the world population are shrinking and there are many, many, many factors that go into that. Again, idea fertility. We're going to not look immigration for this lecture, it will be another rather separate lecture later.
21:10
So lead in just fertility. Total fertility rate is looking at the average or thinking in averages, the average number of children born to each woman during her reproductive years. Now, of course, reproductive years is a very broad number. For some folks it starts at 16, some people start at 12. It can end at 40, it can end at 70. That's kind of a moving target already. Definitely look at the average number of children born to each woman during her reproductive years.
21:44
If we're looking at just maintaining what's called replacement level. If I have two people, a man, woman who are producing children, that's two people, when they die, I have to have two people to replace them if I want my population to stay stagnant, to stay even. The replacement level for a country is going to be 2.1 children. Each woman must have 2.1 children. Why .1? Not all children make it to adulthood, unfortunately. That 2.1 is to make up for the child who may die in infancy or may
22:24
die as a teenager, whatever, child doesn't make it to adulthood. In order to keep your population just looking that natural increase, not looking at immigration, in order to keep your population completely at level, that replacement level, each woman has to have 2.1 children. So, your fertility rate will be 2.1. Now, as we'll see, not all countries have that number. For example, in Bosnia and Herzegovina it's 1.33. That means each woman is having on average 1.3 children.
22:58
That's not enough to replace a parenting couple, I should say, a reproducing couple when they pass away. That's not enough to replace the reproductive parents. 1.33 people, so now we see Bosnia-Herzegovina's natural increase is going to be decreasing. Simply their natural non-immigrant numbers are getting smaller. Uganda, on the other hand, is 5.44. Their number is going to be increasing. On average each woman is having 5.44 children in her lifetime.
23:38
That brings us to the idea of dependency ratios. If we're going to be having babies, how do we feed them? If we look at the changes in countries in terms of fertility rates, we also have to think about how these numbers have changed over time. Both these numbers are 2020 estimates from the CIA, but you can find lots of maps that show how that has changed over history as well, because
24:11
how we utilize children in terms of income, in terms of labor has changed as we've changed our modes of income. In other words, [?] kids are working in the farm as that used to be. This braces the idea of dependency ratios. If I'm going to have children, how do I pay for them? If I'm going to have elderly parents, how do I pay for them? At certain points we're unable to work and support ourselves. When we look at dependency ratios, we're looking strictly at age.
24:40
There are, of course, other reasons why folks are unable to work to disability or illness. If you look at the old-age dependency ratio, this means the number of people over the age of 65 per every 100 of people working between the ages of 15 and 64. Now, 65 is a funny number because I know lots of people who are over the age of 65 who are still working. I certainly hope that I'm still working over the age of 65. 65 has been this magical number, especially
25:13
in the United States culture as the retirement age. 60, 62, 55 depending on what organization or agency you talk to. 65 has been the magical retirement number, even though, of course, many people within that are still working. If you look at the number of people over 65 who aren't then dependent on people between the ages of 15-64 to then work and bring in a source of income for them. The flip side to this would be the child dependency ratio.
25:48
This is looking at the number of children under the age of 14. Now, of course, I know many people who started working below 14. Many of you may have started working at the age of 14. I think my first job, I was under 14 actually. Again, this is the number of children under 14 per 100 people. This is, of course, assuming that people under 14, over 65 are not working. We all know that's not true. That's one way of looking at dependency, is how many people are working
26:17
and bringing in money and income for people who are not working. This number is more and more important as we see demographic transition progress into stage four and five, which will come at the end of the lecture, because if you have a very, very large number of people dependent on a small working population, that becomes problematic. If I have 100 people over the age of 65 dependent on 100 people working, it's very hard to make that income work for everyone who needs food and shelter.
26:59
This number 65, once upon a time, you retired at 65 because you died at 65.
27:08
That number has changed in some parts of the world, but not all parts of the world. This is life expectancy in 2019. As you can see, it is all over the place. 2019, the country that had the highest life expectancy was Tokyo with about 85, I believe. You can see our purple countries are going to have much higher life expectancies, worse are oranges and yellows are going to be in the mid-50s or in some places early 50s, early 50s, mid-50s to 60s.
27:44
Folks are not living the same number of years across the planet. In our Russia lecture, we already talked about some of the economic and cultural factors that impacted especially men in Russia with higher rates of alcoholism following the fall of the Soviet Union. You can see that people aren't living the same amount of years over the world. There are, of course, many factors that go into this, access to health care, access to social programs to support retirement.
28:14
Can you, are you even able to retire? Of course, this is also an average. That's our favorite word, average. As you see the note on our bottom, this is from Our World in Data. The note on the bottom, this is the average number of years, a newborn would live if the pattern were to stay the same throughout its life. This is a very common critique we hear when you hear those urban legends of like, "Oh, well. If we were still in George Washington Times, you will be dead at 30."
28:47
Someone's like, "That's not true. Plenty of people lived past 30 in George Washington's time." Yes, many people did live past 30, but unfortunately, a lot of people did not make it to 30. When we calculate life expectancy, we're taking the number, the average number of years. When you have lower numbers, there are plenty of people who are living very long past this. Unfortunately, there are a lot of folks who are not making it there at all. That brings us to our status statistic, which
29:19
is infant mortality and child mortality rates. This is the number of newborns who die before reaching the age of one. This is as of 2017. When we look at historical data and say that the average lifespan of a Roman, ancient Rome, was 18 or whatever the numbers are, a lot of that is looking at the high number of children who did not make it out of their infancy in other childhood. There are many things that influence the death of children.
29:52
You can see parts of the world where the numbers are going to be highest. You see parts of the world where the numbers are, might be, higher than you think. The US actually has a much higher infant mortality rate than a lot of our so called westernized cousins in Europe and in Canada and Australia. There are many things that cause children to pass away. You can find lots of links, actually. Our World in Data has an entire report looking at the different causes of death.
30:25
Again, this is going to be access to healthcare, access to prenatal care, access to different types of birthing facilities. We need to have a medical intervention for a birth or maybe a preterm birth. This is going to be something that throws off some of your numbers in terms of life expectancy. It's not just that we all drop dead at 55. It's that not everyone makes it to 55. Infant mortality is going to be death before the age of one. Child mortality is between the ages of one and five.
30:58
You also can find something called youth mortality which is going to be looking at teenage, before the age of, I think, 15. This is going to be number of deaths again per year per 1000 babies. Sweden, if we look at 2020, 2.6 babies died that year, or estimated died that year per 1000 babies. Japan is one of the lowest at 1.9. The actual lowest is Slovenia 1.7. In comparison, the US does not have a very good track record 5.3, which is pretty high for a westernized country.
31:36
Then the highest in the world is Afghanistan with 104 babies dying per 1000 babies. Again, where are you living on this planet is going to dictate a lot about your life, your quality of life, especially in terms of access to clean water, access to hospitals, hospital beds, number of doctors per people, all of those numbers that we look at as we look into demographics. We see where do people have access to health care, do they have access to different types of food and so on, so forth.
32:13
Now, just like we saw that map of the world that showed that infant mentality is different across the world, the problem with this IMR is those infant mortality rates. Is there just an average? Average number has raised a lot of the details as necessary to do important policy and public healthcare work. For example, if we look at just the United States that 5.3 in 2017 is 5.8. That 5.8 number of babies per 1000 babies is not evenly spread across the entire countries, even within one country.
32:56
We see much higher rates of infant mortality in the American South, and some of our more rural countries. We see much lower numbers of infant mortality on the coasts.
33:12
Why is that? North and South Dakota are right next to each other and you have two extremes here. There's a lot more that goes into access of healthcare than just what country you are. Your ethnicity and race will have a lot to do with your access to healthcare, or the treatment by your doctors when you get healthcare. In fact, there's a study done showing that African American women were more likely to die in childbirth, independent of income or education.
33:41
There was a story of a woman, African American woman with a doctorate who actually worked for the CDC investigating infant mortality and who passed away as a result of birth complications. Race has a lot to do with your access to healthcare and your treatment by healthcare professionals. Income. Are you able to afford prenatal care? Do you have access to prenatal care? Education. Do you know that you need to have prenatal care? There's a lot more information that goes into these numbers.
34:14
Averages can give us a very short picture, but they do not tell the whole story. To truly understand geography, we have to dive deeper into more data. Again, this is just by state, you could look at a lot more different types of data. There's something that population geographers and people who work in census do is they dive deeper into what these numbers mean, and how can we improve access to care and improve education based on what these numbers are telling us.
34:44
That's what the census is so important, is you want everyone to be counted so we can make sure that everyone is accurately represented, get accurate support for all populations. If you look at the number of people who are passing away, and the number of people who are being born, we have to talk about population growth. Why do some populations grow a lot faster and some populations grow a lot slower? If we look at AD 1, oh, there goes my stupid bar there,
35:15
if I look at AD 1 this is the last 2,000 years. You can see, we had a pretty stagnant growth through here and then it shot off pretty fast. [chuckles] We've seen an exponential growth and this is human population. Of course, today in 2020 we are above 7 billion people on our lovely little planet. How do we measure that and why does it change the way it does? Currently, our population is slowing. We are still increasing, but we are increasing at a slower rate than we have been previously.
35:50
One way we measure this is doubling time. Those of you who are biology majors will also use this if you are doing a microbe Petri dish populations, looking at how fast it takes for a migrant population to increase. I think that cancer researchers do this as well in terms of tumor growth, probably [?] as well, but oops. Looking at the year zero, so year one for our common era, AD is Anno Domini, but we also say common era. Our entire planet had a population of 250 million people.
36:34
To put this in context, in 2019 California, the state of California had about 40 million people, four zero. The entire US in 2018 had about 327 million people. By the year, oops, from the year zero to year 1650, we went from 250 million to 500 million. We went from being less than the entire US to more than the entire US, but it took us 1,650 years to double our population. At this time, we would say that our doubling time was 1,650 years. To get to the next marker, was then to
37:21
1820 which is 170 to get to 1 billion. Now we vastly reduced our doubling time. We went from 1,600 years to less than 200 years. To hit the next doubling time. It took us less than a hundred years.
37:42
All right. Now we're looking at less than 50 years. This is the doubling time again, is how fast it takes us to double our population. I've seen different numbers. I saw one number, it said 54, one was the 61, while I was given a nice average, say that roughly right now the world's doubling time is 55 years. If we are a little more than 7 billion right now, we'll get to 14 billion in roughly 55 years. That's the idea of doubling time. Some times people talk about a population
38:18
explosion because as you see, we've increased quite a bit from took us a thousand years here to 40 years here. Thomas Malthus had a quote, "The power of population is indefinitely greater than the power in the earth to produce a substance of man." You might sometimes hear someone say that the Malthusian Principles or a Malthusian Theory and Malthus basically believed that humans were going to reproduce so much until we reused up our resources and then died out.
38:55
The idea being, if you had a bunch of microbes in a Petri dish, they would eat all of the nutrients until there was no nutrients left and then they'd all would go to extinct. Malthus had this theory. Then Paul Ehrlich had a book in the 1960s called The Population Bomb, which had a lot of the same things of, "Hey, we're reproducing too fast, we're having too many babies. We're going to use up all of the resources on earth, and then we're all going to die out."
39:27
A lot of calls for population control has hearken back to this. There have been, of course, many comments throughout history of people making references to either Malthus or Ehrlich about reducing population because it's concerned that humans are going to just produce continuously until we use up all of Earth's resources. However, if we look about how do we, we'll as to have a government, I don't know. How does the government [chuckles] encourage or discourage people to have babies.
40:04
If we're worried about this giant population explosion, how do government and policy influences this? We have different types of population policies. For example, you might have an expansive population policy. We see this in many countries that have a shrinking population. These are policies that say, "Hey, please have more babies. We will pay you." There are countries that will pay you to have more babies because they are so in need of increasing numbers.
40:37
Tax incentives to pay you for having babies. More family-friendly services. If you know that you're able to work from home more or you'll have more time off for newborns, you might be more likely do have more children. There's billboards that say, "Having babies are your patriotic duty." That's when when your government and policies are trying to encourage your population to have more babies to expand your population. A more severe one is going to be a eugenic population policies.
41:12
These are policies that restrict only specific cultures or races from reproducing. Eugenics is anything that is limiting populations, again, a basis of race and ethnicity. This is when women of indigenous tribes and Latina ancestry were forcibly sterilized.
41:37
This was common, especially on Native American reservations. Women were sterilized without their knowledge and against their will. Additional taxation. If you have babies and the government has decided that your race or your culture should not be having babies, there's additional taxes on this. This is different than eugenic like a genocide where people are forcibly murdered, like we saw in the Holocaust in the 1940s. This is going to be restricting population reproduction.
42:12
Again, more sterilization. There was both in the United States and in New Zealand, Australia, you have the practice where the government would forcibly take children from indigenous peoples and replace them, either into white homes and white families or into schools that would then erase their language and erase their culture. This is another type of eugenic population policy, where it says effort to erase an entire culture. It's very targeted at a specific culture.
42:48
A more broad term of this would be the restrictive population policies. These are policies that are going to reduce number of children, one per family, across the board. Not just for one specific culture or race and so fines. If you have too many babies, we're going to fine you. This is a practice in some countries that are more concerned about their population numbers. Increases in abortions and infanticide or murder of babies quite often
43:20
of female babies depending on what part of the world you're in. This could be caused by the government or caused by families who they find out the gender of the archers had the second biological sex of their baby, either in utero or after birth and decide we don't want to have a female baby. We're going to abort this fetus or kill this baby in favor of having a male baby later. Restrictive population policies as the government, putting actions in place are going to reduce the number
43:54
of children born per family. All three of these are going to be government and policy-driven. It's going to be top-down type effect. Now, I'll just talk about limiting the number of children and these calls for saying, "Hey, too many babies being born, we need to reduce our population." There's a big concern, this is all just a thinly veiled racist policy. Anytime you say, "Hey, there are too many babies being born," no one ever says there's too many Norwegians being born.
44:35
A lot of the global dialogue about being too much population growth, and too many babies being born, quite often this is focused on people of color. You might hear complaints about, "Oh, China's having too many babies. India's having too many babies." In the United States we hear complaints about people from Latinx ancestry or people from African-American ancestry having too many babies. There's a lot of concern that whenever you talk about
45:06
population control, it really is a conversation about race. This is again going to be that concerned about eugenics. Is it that we're concerned about there being too many babies being born or is it concerned about which kind of babies are being born? Anytime you hear anyone talk about, "Oh, there's too much population," be really careful because there's a lot of other subtext happening there.
45:36
More and more instead of talking about too many babies being born, it's more about the amount of resources being used because not all people on all different parts of the world use resources the same. For example, you may have taken what's called a carbon footprint quiz or an ecological footprint quiz where they asked you things like how much meat do you eat, how much do you drive? Do you use air conditioning? Their problems needs quizzes as well.
46:05
That gives you an idea of what does your lifestyle require in terms of planetary resources. If we look at in terms of resources, then we may see that the United States, for example, babies being born in the US are using way more resources than for example, a baby being born in Uganda. Definitely, I want to caution on any conversations about too many people being born. It's more about what kind of resources are being used. Our planet has a large capacity if we use things responsibly.
46:42
Again, there's lots of charts showing you how much a baby born in country A consumes versus a baby being born and country B consumes in terms of petroleum products, plastics, and whatnot. Again, it's more about the resources being used and not instead the number of babies being born where. This brings us back to the last idea, the demographic transition. This is a really key geographic principle. This is looking at how on different civilizations, move throughout different stages of development.
47:26
Whenever people do complain about, "Oh, there's too many babies being born." That's not going to happen forever. There's a natural cycle. As populations progress through the demographic transitions that are going to change where babies are being born, how many and so on so forth. We're going to go through the steps one by one, the different stages. I want to point out stage five is a relatively new one. We're just starting to see countries falling here it says yet to be seen.
48:02
We are starting to see a few countries fall in this category. Not very many. Stage five is a-- Some people argue that it doesn't exist yet, but just I want you to know that it might be coming within your lifetime. First of all, let's go ahead and look at what this graph means. This green line here is going to be your birth rate. This is the number of birth of babies born per people per year. In both stage one, stage two, your birth rates very high. Lots of babies being born.
48:35
Of course, there are many factors that go into why people have a high amount of babies. One being, if you work in agriculture, you need someone to help run the farm. Farming is a very labor-intensive industry and if you have a family farm, you need children to help with the chores. Now the reason for having a large number of babies that we especially see in stage one and two is going to be that again, not all babies make it out of infancy. By having more babies, you increase the chances
49:09
that more will make it to adulthood. There are, of course, many cultural reasons as well. There are many cultures that value having large families, that your status and joy come from having more children, on different religions promote having more children. There are many cultural reasons as well as why we have more children. We're looking at stage one, stage two, we're going to have a very high birthrate. Then the red line here is going to be your death rate.
49:41
How many people are dying per 1,000 people per year? Remember, again, if I take my birth rate and minus my death rate, that's going to give me my amount of increase, and that will eventually lead to my population. In stage one, oops.
50:01
Stage one have a lot of people being born and a lot of people dying, so my population is pretty low. The population is pretty low. Quite often this is happening because that life is not good. [chuckles] People just aren't surviving. There's famine. There's war. There is plague. Life is not good. We're having lots of babies because they're not going to make it and a lot of people are dying. You might have your population pyramid to look like this.
50:34
We're going to talk more about population pyramids later. You can see these shapes that are showing you how a population is changing. As we move into Stage two, I'm still having lots of children. My death rate is dropping. As my death rate decreases, now my natural increase is getting bigger. Now my population is getting bigger because more people are surviving. I'm still having lots of children, but now people are surviving. This could mean that we have better medicine,
51:10
so more babies are making it into adulthood. We might have better agriculture, so less concern about famine, more ability to have excess food stored to help us make it through times of of low yield. If you have a surplus one year, can you store it so you can eat it later? Stage two, is often linked to improvements in terms of quality of life, especially around medicine, people living longer and more survival.
51:43
If I then go into stage three, now we start having less children. My birthrate's going to begin to decline, not as fast as death rates decreasing. Now my population is still increasing. We're going to have more of influence from immigration. On stage three, we start to see more introduction of contraception and birth control. We also see a lot of improvement, economic conditions. As birthrates are starting to decline, one possible reason they're
52:20
declining is that women are going back into the workforce. If they're not raising children, having more children, having less babies, so that they're more in the workforce, increasing economy. Then sometimes there's correlation with education and such. Looking at this here, my birth rate is starting to drop and my death rate is dropping quite a bit. It starts to plateau about through here. I still have quite a bit of natural increase, but I started to cut off.
52:55
I know my mouth keeps getting in the way. If you look at the population pyramid, if you compare my stage two with my stage one, we'll see a weird blunted off shape at the bottom. That's a result of having less children. We're still living the same amount of time, not by average, but it's less children being born. Now as we go into stage four, we definitely start to have death rates have stabilized and we've definitely reduced our birth rates quite a bit.
53:30
Now our population growth is much, much slower. You can see that we have this rapid uptick through here, fast growth, fast growth, fast growth starting to slow down. Then moving to stage four is getting quite a bit slower, my growth rates.
53:47
What we start to see in stage three, we definitely see quite a bit in stage four. There's going to be more reproductive rights for women. Education for women. If women are finishing high school and going to college or going to delay having babies until later. Most women wait till after college to have babies. Not all do, of course. More urbanization. If you're not going to be on a farm, you may not need to have as many children to help you with that.
54:16
In fact, it might be harder to raise children in an expensive city. Now we have increased infant survival rates. There's less pressure to have more children because you don't need them for the farm. You're not worried about as many passing away, you might be having less children because of that. Now we have much, much slower population growth because both your death rates and your birth rates are lower. You're going to have improvement in medicine and health care access.
54:46
Then we start to go into the stage five, which depending on who you ask, some people think it hasn't happened yet, some people think that it's already starting to show up. Now with stage five, your birth rate is actually less than your death rate. That means that more people are dying than babies are being born. This means that you're going to have a continuously aging population. Your country has a negative growth and your population is getting smaller.
55:20
You can see here all these little question marks because we're not quite sure it's happening yet. You start to have this population drop down. It's very hard to measure this completely because immigration is such a large part of our planet. It's hard to look at an economy and anything by eliminating immigration because everything on this planet is fueled by immigration. The theory is that, if you have so many more people dying than babies being born because people get
55:53
older and older people eventually pass away, you will eventually have a decrease in population.
56:06
One way that we can snapshot this demographic transition is by using a population pyramid. Population pyramid, nice, fast visual little treat here. This is going to be the US population pyramid for 2020. This is from the US Census. You can go to this web site and you can look up any country in the world. You can go data all the way back, some of them go back to the '70s and look at how population pyramids have changed. What these pyramids do, they divide it strictly by a male, by a female.
56:38
I am not entirely sure if this is a result of politics that doesn't recognize non-binary folks or this is looking strictly in terms of reproduction. I don't know that. They do only look at male and female here. It's very, very gender-biased to separate red for women and blue for men. Then this here is by age. This is your population. If I look at the US in 2020, I have 10 million males between the age of zero and four. I have roughly 10 million females in the ages of zero and four.
57:28
[?] then can say, "I'm going to have I don't know, 12 million males between the age of 25 and 29 versus 12 million females between the age of 25 and 29." Pretty even both sides. You see some fluctuations here. You can talk about US economy and less ladies likely born in terms of depressions and recessions. We might see changes in those who grew up during the recession of 2008 versus the '70s had a recession. Then as you get higher up, we see-- As I go above 100, I have
58:04
more women of age of 100 than I have men of age over 100. You can compare both male and female by age category. As we saw in your previous slides, looking at the shape of population pyramids, the shape of your pyramid is going to have a lot to say about what your population is doing. This roughly corresponds to stage one, stage two, then stage three, stage four, five. This is me comparing Angola, which is in Africa, to Japan, and it is both for 2010.
58:40
If I look at Angola, Angola has had a lot of civil war, a lot of pretty severe violence in Angola. You can see that there is a rapidly expanding pyramid here. A lot of babies are being born, but they're not making it to adulthood.
58:56
If I have 1 million babies being born or 1.2 million babies being born in 2010, I only have 200,000 women over age 45 to 59. This pyramid here, here's the idea that we have lots of babies being born, but lots of people passing away. This gives you a hint that you might have more of a war conflict, especially if you see the male gender being hit harder. That might be an indication of war as well if you have a country that conscripts its males or drafts its males, rather.
59:39
It also is going to be an indication maybe less access to health care, maybe less access to food security. It's going to be what we think of as stage one, stage two demographic transitions. Compare that to Japan, if I look in 2010, I had less than 3,000 girls were born in the year 2010, but I have 5,000 women between the age of 16 and 64. I have more women in their 60s, about retirement age than I have babies being born. This populists pyramid here is going to be four and leading into five.
1:00:19
Japan isn't fully into stage five yet, but it's definitely getting there, though probably one of the first countries to get there. As you have an aging population, this is going to throw off your dependency ratios. If I have a lot of people retiring, who are then dependent on a smaller number of people who are working, that might be an issue for your economy.
1:00:45
You can think about it. If you have one child caring for two elderly parents, that can be a concern. This is going to be again, more towards that contracting type. You could compare Angola to Japan, two very different countries, different types of healthcare system versus different types of social support systems, different types of governments and economies. You can see how this impacts the demographics of population of your entire country.
1:01:19
That's all I have for you on this. Feel free to let me know if you have any questions and go ahead and take your quiz. This is your last lecture before-- If you're in my world geography class, not if you're my cultural, if you're in my world regional geography class, this is your last lecture before your midterm. This is fair game for the midterm. Yes. All right. Thank you so much and take care. Bye.
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